Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, everyone, this is Dawn Klem, and you are on my podcast, Milkweed and Monarchs.
[00:00:07] Today's episode is probably the most difficult one I've recorded in the last three years we've been together.
[00:00:17] It's a deep dive into the age old question of nature versus nurture.
[00:00:24] When I was a little girl, I was never one that really aspired to have a lot of children.
[00:00:33] I never thought about actually giving birth to children. Let me put it to you this way. I used to say to my dad all the time, I'm gonna have an adoption agency and I want to adopt as many children as I can and I want to take care of them, dad. My dad's like, you're probably going to have 10 kids.
[00:00:54] I'm like, no, I'm not going to have 10 kids. I'm going to have an orphanage, Dad. I was really convinced that that's what I was going to do in my life.
[00:01:04] I never really gave the idea of having children a second thought until I became married to really to Craig. My first husband was so tumultuous, I don't even know why I would try to have a baby with him.
[00:01:22] But once I got married to Craig, his family really wanted us to have children and my family really wanted us to have children.
[00:01:31] We were so happily married that we thought we should at least try to have one. One was really what we agreed on.
[00:01:40] So, as you know, if you've listened to any of my podcasts, I went through in vitro and I was unsuccessful. I actually got pregnant, but then I miscarried, so giving birth was not going to be in my future.
[00:01:58] I didn't really seem to mind that so much because I like the idea of adopting. I had always felt like I was going to adopt children.
[00:02:10] I had to convince Craig.
[00:02:14] Of course, every man wants their own genes, and I get that, I really do.
[00:02:19] But for me, I always felt like, oh, it's not going to matter. We go and we get puppies, don't we? My husband's like, oh, my God. It's a classic of you, dawn, that you would relate the story of having children to puppies. But yeah, it's just the point that you adopt something, you love them, you nurture them, you raise them to the best of your ability, and you feel the love back, back.
[00:02:45] And that's how I assumed it would go. When we adopted our daughters, I had no reason to think that it was not going to be like that.
[00:02:58] So 24 years ago in November, my husband and I flew to Romania to pick up two beautiful Little girls to bring home.
[00:03:12] We brought them to our home ready to be parents. And really, we were so excited about it.
[00:03:21] We loved them unconditionally right out of the gate.
[00:03:26] I'm sure that they didn't. I mean, it was so hard for them. I can't even imagine. They didn't speak any English. They're leaving their country, and they're coming to a new country with new customs, new ideas, new everything, and they just didn't know how it was going to end up for them. They must have been terrified, but they couldn't, you know, say anything to us because we couldn't communicate with them at that time. I always remember that moment just thinking, oh, my gosh, those poor little girls. My mom felt the same way. Both of us were, like, crying in the background, thinking, oh, and I. I wondered so many times, did we do the right thing?
[00:04:16] But in my mind, I kept thinking, well, we're going to love them. We're going to nurture them, we're going to provide for them, we're going to give them a good life.
[00:04:27] And when they got old enough, we would encourage them to reach out to their relatives in Romania. We didn't want to go back to Romania. We. We didn't have a connection in Romania. And we felt like them going back to Romania or talking to relatives or family members over there would be their personal journey. And I still believe that.
[00:04:56] But as they grew into women and formed their own lives, we encountered a different force. The pull of culture and the search for belonging.
[00:05:08] My oldest daughter married into a family from Venezuela, creating a new and completely different family dynamic.
[00:05:19] A dynamic where her husband's parents lived with them in the home.
[00:05:28] They didn't have their own home, but they all lived together.
[00:05:35] And this was completely different from our American culture, how she had been raised with us, where her nurture in our American home collided with a different set of cultural values and a different definition of what family is.
[00:05:59] I'm sharing this not to complain or to cast any blame for I've kept the names out of the story, but to explore the why behind the silence.
[00:06:13] How do children we raised feel like they don't belong?
[00:06:18] How does a new culture reshape the identity that we helped to build?
[00:06:26] I've realized that while I cannot control the path they chosen, I can control my response to it. And as you'll hear at the end of this episode, despite the debt and the distance, my conclusion will always remain the same. I would do it all over again.
[00:06:51] So let me jump into the story and I'll let you decide what is more powerful. Nature versus nurture.
[00:07:03] So today I'm going to tell you the story of my oldest daughter's wedding and the events that have gone on after.
[00:07:15] I hope you enjoy the story and you come away thinking about nature versus nurture.
[00:07:23] So let's begin.
[00:07:27] When we first adopted the girls, one of the things the counselor told us is to let them watch TV as much TV as they could, because that was a way where they were going to pick up the English language quicker.
[00:07:46] And at the time, that made so much sense to us. It really, really did.
[00:07:52] We had English as a second language teacher that worked with them in school, and then we would, you know, watch movies with them or we had them on the Disney Channel, that kind of thing. So they, they weed and always watch TV before they went to school. And then they had their English as a second language teacher once they, they got to school and things progressed and I thought it was going fairly well. By the time we got them into middle school, you would never even have known that they were adopted.
[00:08:32] The oldest one had a little bit of an accent still, but the youngest one did not have an accent.
[00:08:39] And so. And they're both dark like my husband and myself. So you would have never known that. I didn't give birth to these girls.
[00:08:49] One of the things that the girls and my mom and I enjoyed was watching say yes to the Dress.
[00:08:58] That was a fun Saturday night thing for the four of us to do.
[00:09:04] And so in middle school and even later when they were in high school, we would still sit on the couch, all four of us together, we might eat popcorn and we would watch that show say yes to the Dress with Randy Finoli.
[00:09:19] We loved it. We all loved it because we loved to see who the bride was. They usually had two brides on the show.
[00:09:27] So you could see, you know, the kind of dresses that they would pick out and the jewelry, all the accoutrements to go along with their dress, shoes, the whole thing. And we just had a lot of fun watching that.
[00:09:46] And it, it became kind of like a routine for us. That's how much we loved.
[00:09:53] Never ever occurred to me one time that my daughter, my oldest daughter would not go with me to pick out her wedding dress. And I did not see it coming at all. I was completely blindsided by it.
[00:10:13] So she had been working at the same place as my husband and she was doing fairly well. She was making a good income.
[00:10:22] My husband was let go from that job and subsequently he got another job. They restructured the organization. And they were downsizing, and he got another better job in Grand Rapids at the time.
[00:10:37] But it was hard for my daughter to lose him out of that organization. I. I think he had become her security blanket a little bit, just knowing that he was there, and she could always reach out to him if she needed something.
[00:10:54] So they actually offered her a promotion to stay at that job, but she didn't want to stay because my husband wasn't there. And so she left.
[00:11:08] And this was all right around the time of COVID So during COVID everything was completely went haywire as far as work goes.
[00:11:19] And both of them were working in computer areas so they could both stay home to work.
[00:11:28] And my husband would use his computer in the basement. She'd use her computer upstairs, and then they would even eat lunch together.
[00:11:37] And it was a good situation for her.
[00:11:41] She had gotten an apartment about two miles away from us, and. But she was at our house most of the time, and it was fine, completely fine.
[00:11:53] But she'd been struggling, too, because she definitely wanted to find a partner. She is in her later 20s now. She wanted to get married and get settled down.
[00:12:04] She was having a hard time finding, Finding the right person for her.
[00:12:10] And of course, she started going on the dating apps.
[00:12:15] I mean, my gosh, what can we say? Our generation went to the bar and picked people up.
[00:12:22] I mean, I don't know. No, no dating thing is optimal. Let's just be honest.
[00:12:29] It's just a generational thing.
[00:12:32] But at the time, I remember thinking, oh, Lord, I don't know.
[00:12:39] But. So she started dating, and she dated quite a few people.
[00:12:46] Finally, she had found someone that she thought she was going to be compatible with, and they had had a pretty good date. The thing about my oldest daughter is she likes to be outdoors. She loves nature.
[00:13:01] So whenever she's dating, somebody usually wants to take them somewhere where it's outdoorsy, maybe have a picnic, hike on the beach, take a hike in the mountains, go on a trail, that kind of thing.
[00:13:17] And they had gone on a trail over by the. The by Lake Michigan in Spring Lake and Grand Haven area, where we had lived originally, which we had moved since moved to Rockford.
[00:13:37] So while they were there and they. They hiked for like four or five hours. She ended up losing her cell phone when she realized she didn't have her phone. It was when they got back to the car.
[00:13:51] So this guy went back to the beach with her, and they looked everywhere for that phone, and they did not find the phone. And of course, she's Devastated. She's a young girl. They're all glued to their cell phones. Even I think I'm glued to my cell.
[00:14:04] I should be.
[00:14:06] So she got home, and she was so upset about it, understandably.
[00:14:13] And I said, well, what about this date? How did it go with him? She said, oh, he was so nice, Mom. He went with me back to the beach. Even though he had something that he really should have attended for work, he gave that up to go back to the beach.
[00:14:29] So right then there, that was a clue to me that this guy is going to be more than any of the others had been so far.
[00:14:38] And to me, it was kind of a good sign, actually. It seemed good.
[00:14:43] The next thing that kind of happened is I was working at the hospital in the clinic, which. So it's right across the street from the hospital, really. And I get a call from my daughter saying that this guy that she had met needed to go for an outpatient procedure up in the cardiology unit.
[00:15:04] And she wanted to know where to park and how to get there. And I said, well, I can meet you over there and show you how to go. She's like, okay, that sounds good.
[00:15:13] I told her where to park.
[00:15:15] So in the middle of my clinic, I walked over there. Now, it's quite a ways because you got to walk across a bridge that goes over the street, and then you got to go to the elevators to get up to the inpatient unit.
[00:15:29] And I got to the lobby area, and I called her, and she goes, you don't have to worry about it. I found a place to park, and I'm already up here. I'm like, what?
[00:15:38] Okay, first of all, I left the clinic to go there, and she was already up there. So I'm like, that was another sign to me that, okay, he's maybe going to be a little bit more important than what I thought.
[00:15:55] So I went back to the clinic and not thinking too much, and, you know, the. The relationship started to progress, and I learned a little bit more about him.
[00:16:07] He was from Venezuela. He had come to the United States, and he was working at a Christian college and Seventh Day Adventist. So that was a little different for me. I had a. It took me a while to figure out if they were Christian or not, which is crazy. Yes, they are Christian, but they have different beliefs, just like the Baptist from the Catholic. But still, I was still trying to figure that out. I had to go ask my nun friend if they were really Christian. Well, yes, they really are.
[00:16:48] And he had come over to go to college there, and Then he graduated from there and he was working there.
[00:16:57] And in the meantime, my daughter decided to quit her job.
[00:17:07] So she quit her job outright and she started working in Myers.
[00:17:14] She wasn't exactly happy with that. So then she decided that she was going to go back to beauty school.
[00:17:23] She really wanted to do something with cosmetics.
[00:17:28] So she got all the way to the very end of that program and then she decided to drop out of that.
[00:17:34] So you can see that she's starting to struggle now. We can, we were watching this happen, but she's not, you know, a baby anymore. She's over 25. And I mean, we all make mistakes growing up and learning and so we were just trying to let her figure out who she was.
[00:18:02] Well, the guy, by now she's dating him and we have met him, seems like a nice guy, respectful, easy to get along with.
[00:18:13] But there was something from a mother's point of view. I just, I don't know, you know, I was, it still had an uneasiness about it.
[00:18:23] He had brought his parents over. They lived in Venezuela. His dad is actually was raised, I think in Italy and his mom was raised in Colombia.
[00:18:39] When his dad left Italy to come back to the family, he was from Venezuela, they had a beautiful house in Venezuela and then Hugo Chavez was the leader and they ended up losing everything.
[00:18:53] Can't imagine.
[00:18:55] So anyhow, he brings his parents over here to live with with him.
[00:19:00] And in the meantime his sister had come over too. His sister went through nursing school and then she ended up coming over here and she met someone and got married and she became an American citizen through the lottery.
[00:19:18] But my daughter's husband and his parents, he became a citizen on his own. You know, he went through the whole thing and then his parents were working on it. I don't know if they're citizens yet or not, but at any rate they live with them.
[00:19:40] He built, they were living in a small house in the town where he was at the college. He had bought a house and he redid that house and it was beautiful. It was small though. It was a two bedroom house and it had a kitchen, a living room and two bedrooms and it was all just on the one floor, very open.
[00:20:03] It was a really cute house.
[00:20:06] Well, the next thing you know, I'm hearing that my daughter is moving in with him and I'm like, huh, you mean you're going to live with him and his parents?
[00:20:19] I, I would rather you move into an apartment.
[00:20:23] I just don't think it's a good thing to move in with his Parents.
[00:20:30] I'm not a fan of that idea, but I couldn't talk her out of it. And she moved in with them.
[00:20:40] Then she started telling me, you know, it wasn't long after that, maybe a year, that he wanted to get married, and he was building her a house.
[00:20:54] So he did build a house. The house is quite nice. His parents moved into that house with them, and they're gonna get married now.
[00:21:04] And, of course, I was so excited because I thought, oh, this is going to be fun to plan a wedding.
[00:21:13] There had been some issues.
[00:21:15] It was definitely a cultural difference, and there were some things that went on that really gave me pause for trust issues.
[00:21:27] My daughter changed a lot, and I didn't really feel very respected by her anymore.
[00:21:36] She said a lot of things to me that she never would have said before.
[00:21:41] And so I was struggling, definitely struggling, but I thought, okay, maybe the.
[00:21:48] The wedding will be something that's going to bring us together.
[00:21:53] She didn't seem like she was overly excited to get married.
[00:22:01] And so I thought, well, we got time. He did buy her a beautiful diamond ring, engagement ring. So he was obviously very serious about her.
[00:22:13] The four of us sat down to talk about it, and I don't know.
[00:22:19] It didn't go well. I don't know if it's cultural or if it just happened so fast.
[00:22:27] There were just so many things about it that didn't feel right from my end, and I just could never really put a finger on what that was.
[00:22:38] But anyhow, they decided that they were gonna get married. They got the ring, it was at a Christmas present, and they were going to get married the following December.
[00:22:51] His mom and dad had got married at the justice of the peace, so he wanted to get married at the justice of the Peace. And it was during COVID so it didn't seem like that would be the worst thing.
[00:23:05] Although it was for me, because she basically just held me at arm's length, and I was involved in absolutely nothing. No planning, no nothing. I think the worst part came for me when I was in Baltimore visiting my friend for her birthday. So it was October, and my husband sent me a picture of her trying on her wedding dress.
[00:23:40] And so it says, I bought my wedding dress.
[00:23:43] So I didn't even get to go with her to pick out her wedding dress.
[00:23:48] And I was devastated.
[00:23:52] I was devastated. But then I thought about it. I'm like, well, who took the picture of you in that wedding dress?
[00:23:58] So I sent a text message back to her and said, who took the photo?
[00:24:04] Well, she went with his mom and his aunt to pick out the wedding dress. She didn't even include me in anything to do with her getting married. Zero.
[00:24:18] And I was devastated.
[00:24:22] I was so sad. And really, Craig and I thought for a long time, should we even go to the wedding? I found out that she asked my cousin to go to the wedding before she ever even talked to me about it.
[00:24:40] And we felt very pushed out of the whole entire situation.
[00:24:46] She knew that we were struggling whether or not to go to the wedding.
[00:24:51] So she decided, what am I going to do? I got to make this up. I got to try to rectify this, you know?
[00:24:57] So she did call me, and she said, mom, I think you and I are not doing a very good thing for each other. We've. We're pushing each other away, and I don't want that when I'm getting married. And I said, well, you watched all those stupid say yes to the dress shows with me, and then you went out and bought a dress without even considering me. Me at all.
[00:25:24] I said, that's really quite painful, to tell you the truth.
[00:25:29] So she says, okay, I'm gonna call the bridal shop and let me see what I can do. So she calls me back, and she said, the bridal shop owner said they'd be willing to take the dress back if I bought that dress, a dress of that value or more, and it wouldn't be any problem, and they would just transfer the money that I spent on that dress to the new dress.
[00:25:58] So her dad and I drove down there and met her at the bridal shop. It was in Niles, Michigan. And we went to the shop, and we actually picked out a beautiful wedding dress from Randy Finoli. We got a good price on it. It looked absolutely beautiful on her. I bought her the earrings, the shoes, everything to go with it. Everything.
[00:26:25] Okay.
[00:26:29] And in the meantime, our youngest daughter, she had been shopping with her to look for her dress for her sister to wear in the wedding, and she had seen a dress that she really liked. So. So her sister bought her the dress and sent it to her.
[00:26:48] So on the day of her wedding, she wore the dress that her sister gave her.
[00:26:58] And in the meantime, she did not include us in anything. She had me wear a very fancy dress and her sister wear a very fancy dress, and they got married in the. At the justice of the peace. And my cousin's wife was a florist, and she did all of her flower arrangements for it. It was beautiful, but it was at a.
[00:27:27] The justice of the piece, really. Okay.
[00:27:30] Nobody was dressed up but her side of the family, I felt like a complete idiot.
[00:27:38] Then they had their reception at a very nice restaurant. But the restaurant is dry, so you couldn't have any. They don't serve any alcohol. But they said since it was a wedding reception, it would be okay if we brought wine and champagne.
[00:27:54] So her dad and I bought all the wine and champagne and we brought it down there. We also gave them a card with money in it at the reception. Not one. His family sat on one side of the room and we sat on the opposite side of the room and nobody talked to the other side of the room. It was one of the most uncomfortable weddings and receptions that I have ever been to in my entire life. Life.
[00:28:31] I was so upset. And when she was getting ready to set up the restaurant, she had bought napkins and ornaments because they got married during the month of December like his parents had.
[00:28:45] And they did all these traditional things. And I said, oh, I would love to get a bunch of those ornaments and hang them on a tree. My Christmas tree is a reminder of you. Would you mind help? No, you're not getting anything.
[00:28:59] Do you want the ornament or the napkins though? I go, no, I don't want the napkins. I don't use napkins. And then she had gotten reindeer napkin rings. So I said, what about the napkin rings? Can I have those? She goes, no, you can't have them. And I don't know where they are. I lost them. So sorry, you're out of luck.
[00:29:21] We left there that night. I don't think I've ever cried so hard in my life.
[00:29:27] I basically got treated like a second class citizen.
[00:29:34] And she never once apologized to me.
[00:29:38] And we do not have a relationship now.
[00:29:43] And it's so hard for me to think that he is the reason why we don't. Because he was always fairly nice.
[00:29:54] So I don't know what went wrong. I feel like she made the turn to him.
[00:30:02] He didn't. He, she's from another country and he's from another country. And they really didn't want to have anything to do with Americans. And that's exactly how I feel.
[00:30:13] I think that America offers them a lot of things, but they don't want to honor our culture.
[00:30:22] I don't know what ever happened to that wedding dress. I spent quite a bit of money on it.
[00:30:29] I told her she could sell it.
[00:30:31] Originally we were trying to get her to have another wedding where we could at least invite my family. She. The only person she invited from my family was my cousin.
[00:30:45] She Grew up with my husband's cousin's children.
[00:30:49] We spent a lot of time with the families back there. She didn't invite any of them to her wedding at all. She did not include any of the people that had been there for her since she came to this country.
[00:31:06] And it was a big slap in the face. It really was a big slap in the face.
[00:31:12] But maybe, you know, if you want to look on the happier side of it, maybe it was because I watched say yes to the Dress so many times that I just had an unrealistic expectation of what I thought her.
[00:31:32] Her wedding day was going to be.
[00:31:35] It was very, very unfortunate.
[00:31:42] And I will say one last thing.
[00:31:44] He took her on a honeymoon, and the honeymoon was to Colombia, because he wanted to introduce her to his family, which is honorable.
[00:31:52] They were barely in the airport, and she started texting me, complaining about him.
[00:32:01] And I texted her back, and I said, you're married now.
[00:32:06] If you have any issues with him, you need to talk to him yourself.
[00:32:13] They never, ever apologized to us. One time, not one time.
[00:32:18] They did exactly what they wanted to do.
[00:32:21] And they have been incredibly disrespectful to me ever since.
[00:32:27] And so she's not going to be a part of my life.
[00:32:32] Neither one of them.
[00:32:34] Her. She had to take her sister with her because those two are the only two that they have for family, because they basically dissed our family.
[00:32:47] If I had to do it all over again, I would still adopt them.
[00:32:54] It was really hurtful at the end, but I think, you know, life isn't easy.
[00:33:04] They're not from our culture.
[00:33:07] And when they could finally become free, they made it clear they didn't like our culture.
[00:33:13] That's exactly what happened.
[00:33:18] So lessons learned moving forward.
[00:33:28] Until the next time.
