Adoption Interview Project 2011: Rachel from The Great Wide Open
Posted in Adoption, Open Adoption Roundtable (OAR) and tagged with Adoption, Life, Meetup, Open Adoption Roundtable (OAR), Travel on 11/17/2011 07:15 am by lilmomma13104
The time has come to reveal who I was paired with for this years Adoption Interview Project which is put on by Heather at Production Not Reproduction. I have participated with different blog challenges from Heather before as she heads up the Adoption Roundtable discussions. This allows bloggers who are involved of all aspects of the adoption world to post their feelings about a certain chosen topic either once a week or sometimes once a month. This month is the Adoption Interview Project. If I would have known about this last year, I would have definitely participated as it was an incredible fun experience. Every participant was randomly paired. If one had special request such as wanting to be paired with a certain side of the adoption triad then that was taken into consideration. I had made a request to be paired with a birth-mother who hopefully I didn’t already know. I think next year I will not put in any request to see what part of the triad I am paired with.
This year I was paired with Rachel from The Great Wide Open. Heather is a nomadic birth-mother who blogs about her nomadic life, adventures of pregnancy and now open adoption. By just reading her blog tag line made me intrigued and kept me digging into her blog to see who she is. She likes to go to poem jams to express her feelings of adoption through her poetry. She currently lives and works in Singapore while enjoying being single. She enjoys the feeling of being single but is not opposed down the road of possibly meeting the “right” person to be a life-long companion.
While introducing ourselves to each other, Rachel and I found that we had quite a few things in common. We both love reading books that do not consist of textbooks, we both are actively with groups on Meetup.com, and we both wanted to pursue a degree in Social Work. She has a BSW but does not use it, and as we are all aware, I am in the pursuit to hang the BSW degree on my office wall someday in the future. She and I also love to travel.
I had a fun time thinking of questions to ask Rachel. When I had thought about sending these fun questions, I failed to save the document on the computer (one disadvantage of not using pen and paper!), and so I had to recreate the questions. I hoped that Rachel wouldn’t think that I was sending random questions, and she stated that I had a great variety of questions. Heather never placed a limit on how many questions we had to ask our partners. Rachel and I both sent each other fifteen different questions. To see the answers that I gave her you will have to click over on her page to read all about them.
Below is the interview that I conducted with Rachel. I hope you all enjoy reading them as much as I did.
1. Out of all the different places you have lived what has been your favorite? What place would you go back to? What was your least favorite place?
That’s such a hard question, but so fun to think about! I have had the opportunity to live in lots of beautiful places, but hands down, the place closest to my heart is Zion National Park in Utah. That place holds magic for me, and it was a huge turning point in my life in many different ways. During the time I was there, the fall seasons of 2005 and 2006, my heart healed and changed in ways that were so unexpected to me, and my life has never been the same. I lived in the employee housing at the bottom of the canyon close to the river, surrounded by red rock walls on all sides. I could go hiking at midnight on a full moon and see everything clearly. I could borrow a friend’s hammock and tie it up by the river and listen to the water and my life go by. I could go running on trails that took me under waterfalls, through small cracks in the walls and between fallen boulders. The people I met there are people who have had a lasting impact on me, taught me invaluable life long lessons, and showed me what life could really be if I let go of grudges, rules, preconcieved ideas of what was expected of me, and all of my notions of ‘truth’ I had so strongly held onto in the past. I became more free to be myself there than I had ever been in my entire life, and I feel like Zion was a springboard for everything I’ve learned since then. The other places I’ve lived have been beautiful and filled with wonderful people for sure, but I don’t know how anything could top the monumentous change for the better that Zion produced in me. Recently, a friend was showing me his new galaxy tab, and as the background for the main page he had a picture of a red rock wall that looked like it had been an ocean wave frozen and sculpted in time. I couldn’t focus on the conversation anymore, all I could do was transport myself back there to those red canyon walls, feeling the dry, gritty sandstone on my finger tips, running my hand along the wall. I was in amazement all over again, even though I was looking at it on a small touch screen on the other side of the planet. So yeah, Zion will always have a place in my heart, and I definitely want to go back there some time.
2. With currently living overseas, do you feel that it is easier for you to heal after placement, or does it make it worse?
I’ve wondered that question myself. In one way, I think it has helped me to heal. Before I became pregnant I had already been traveling around for the past 5 years, but it was all within the United States. When I went to Thailand on vacation, it was the first time in a few years that I had been outside of the US and I was really excited about the adventure. Little did I know when I was making those plans what other little ‘adventure’ life would take me on! It was there that I found out I was pregnant, so from the beginning of Reed’s life I was exploring new paths. I was already in that mindset, and maybe that helped guide me towards my decision to place. After Reed’s birth, it just seemed right that I would go somewhere else, somewhere exciting. The opportunity to teach in Singapore came up rather suddenly, and though it was hard to think about being so far away from him when he was only 4 months old, it just seemed right, it seemed to fit the path I had chosen to travel on, it seemed to be an obvious continuation of my life. So in answer to your question, I guess what helps with the healing most is not what location I’m in, but if I’m doing what’s right for my life. I rely a lot on prayer, heart, intuition and gut feelings in making my big decisions. If I had chosen to stay in the US just to be closer to him, I don’t think it would have helped with the healing process if my heart was telling me to go to Singapore. On the other hand, if my heart were telling me to stay in the US, I don’t think it would have helped to run as far away as I could from him. I went where I felt led to go, and I believe that is what has helped the most with the healing.
3. Naming of Reed, where you involved with the naming process?
Yes! I love the story of how Reed got his name. 
At first, I told Doug and Maura that they could choose the name for him, but they said they wanted Bill and I in on the decision. I always liked the name Max because it’s my brother’s name, who is a man of character, faith, intelligence, sincerity, integrity, and is one of the men I respect most in this world. So when I was carrying him in Alaska I started calling him Max, and so did Bill when we would talk on the phone. When Bill and I both arrived in North Carolina for the 3rd trimester, we would still call him “little Max” when it was just the two of us talking about him, even when we knew his name would be Reed. Doug and Maura thought it was fitting to keep that in his name. William seemed an obvious choice too, since it was both Bill’s name and Doug’s father’s name. The name Reed came from Maura’s side of the family. Her grandmother’s name was Elizabeth Reed. When Doug and Maura were going through adoption procedures, Elizabeth Reed was already aged and didn’t have a firm grasp on the present day and didn’t remember much. But Maura’s mother told her about the adoption and that they were going up to Alaska to meet me, and Mrs. Reed held on to that. She would ask Maura how the adoption is going, and even remembered my name. She passed away shortly after their trip to Alaska, and was a loss to everyone in their family. So his name is Reed William Max Dotson, and we all had a say in it.
At first, I told Doug and Maura that they could choose the name for him, but they said they wanted Bill and I in on the decision. I always liked the name Max because it’s my brother’s name, who is a man of character, faith, intelligence, sincerity, integrity, and is one of the men I respect most in this world. So when I was carrying him in Alaska I started calling him Max, and so did Bill when we would talk on the phone. When Bill and I both arrived in North Carolina for the 3rd trimester, we would still call him “little Max” when it was just the two of us talking about him, even when we knew his name would be Reed. Doug and Maura thought it was fitting to keep that in his name. William seemed an obvious choice too, since it was both Bill’s name and Doug’s father’s name. The name Reed came from Maura’s side of the family. Her grandmother’s name was Elizabeth Reed. When Doug and Maura were going through adoption procedures, Elizabeth Reed was already aged and didn’t have a firm grasp on the present day and didn’t remember much. But Maura’s mother told her about the adoption and that they were going up to Alaska to meet me, and Mrs. Reed held on to that. She would ask Maura how the adoption is going, and even remembered my name. She passed away shortly after their trip to Alaska, and was a loss to everyone in their family. So his name is Reed William Max Dotson, and we all had a say in it.
4. Some people get tattoos as a way to remember their child. Have you ever thought of getting one if you don’t have one already?
I don’t have any tattoos, but I love them on other people. If I were to get one it would have something to do with Reed, but I haven’t been struck with something I want permanently on my body yet. I still think about it at times, and I’m not opposed to it if anything strikes me. My sister, who already has a couple of tattoos and who came to North Carolina for his birth, got his birthdate tattooed on her foot.
5. What initially inspired you to start blogging about your adoption?
There are a few reasons I started blogging about my adoption. I guess the first one is that I wanted to read what other birth moms were saying, but I couldn’t find anything. I later found out that I just didn’t try hard enough because there are lots of birth mothers (well, ok not lots, but a handfull) who blog about their side of the adoption story. I wanted to put a voice out there. Another reason is because I wanted my open adoption to be… open. I assumed that most people are like I was, that they don’t have a clue about what open adoption is besides the quick reference that was made to it in the movie ‘Juno’. I didn’t want my adoption to be a secret, I didn’t want it to be a hidden part of my life that I acted embarrassed about. The fact that I am a mother, that I have a son, is a huge part of who I am, and I don’t hide it or ignore it and I’m definitely not embarrassed or ashamed of it. I don’t regret any of the decisions I made, I don’t think I ‘made a mistake’ by getting pregnant, I was making responsible decisions but sometimes things happen anyway but it doesn’t mean I made a mistake or have anything to regret. Reed was never a ‘mistake’, he has always been a blessing. I guess that’s why I started blogging, because people wonder why a relatively stable 32 year old woman would give up her child, especially when that woman is a friend, family member, old classmate, traveling companion, etc. I want people to be free to talk to me about Reed, to ask me questions, and for me to be free with them. So I put it out there, to add another level of openness to our adoption.
Besides that, I journal quite a bit on my own, so writing about things comes pretty naturally to me. It does help with the healing for me to blog about it, to brag about the good things and mourn openly about the hard times. It helps me to sort things out; ideally I’d have a professional or a support group or someone I could talk to, but with my traveling that hasn’t worked out too well, so I just puke it all out all over the internet. So to all who read my blogs, thanks for being my stand in therapist. 
6. What is the dynamic between you and the birth-father, Bill? Are you still in contact with each other? If you are, do you sometimes wish that you would have stayed in one place to try and parent Reed together?
Bill and I are still in contact with each other, we try to keep each other updated on our lives. I’m so thankful that Bill has been involved as he is. When we separated after first meeting in Colorado where we were both working, we knew that our lives were going in different directions, but we didn’t know I was pregnant at the time. Bill was the first person I told after I took the pregnancy test (I sent him an email from Thailand with the heading, “I hope you’re sitting down for this…”) and was the first person I talked to on the phone the moment my plane landed back in the US. We talked on the phone regularly while I was working in Alaska and he was in Colorado, and he sent me boxes filled with homemade cookies, treats, books, teas, and anything else he could think of that I might want or need. He finished his summer job in Colorado about the same time I finished mine in Alaska, and he spent the next 6 months in NC with me, cooked all of my meals, rubbed my back and feet, went to birthing classes, and held my hand the entire time I was in labor. I cried my eyes out when I left him to come to Singapore. I love Bill with all of my heart and he will always be family to me, but there has never been a time when I have wished we had decided to parent Reed together. We would have had to force a lot of things into place to make that happen, and it didn’t seem right. Adoption on the other hand, seemed right to me from the beginning, and Bill and I are now both continuing on our own individual paths that we’re meant to be on. We have talked about how we want to always keep up a positive relationship with each other and we would like to visit Reed together for years and years to come, but with us living so far apart it’s hard. But mine and Bill’s continued friendship allowed us all to visit Bill in Colorado this past June, and will hopefully allow many more reunions with all of us together in the future.
7. Since you are out of the States quite a bit, what are the US things that you miss? What are some of the things that you MUST always do when you are in the states visiting?
Oh now THAT is a question to think about! What do I miss? Good Mexican food. What must I do? Eat good Mexican food. Haha!!! In all seriousness, there isn’t a whole lot about American culture that I miss.
At the moment, here are the only things I can think of (keep in mind though that Singapore is a very Westernized, cosmopolitan city):
*The price of wine; a cheap bottle of Woodbridge that costs $6 in the States is considered high end and costs about $30 in the supermarket here. Very high alcohol tax in Singapore.
*A clothes dryer that will shrink my jeans back into shape
*Shoes that fit my size 10 feet and clothes that fit me that aren’t labled XL
*Service at restaurants that’s based on tips; the service here is ok, but nothing like the wonderful service I get at restaurants in the US when the waiter knows he/she has to work for my money. I reward generously.
But give me a good burrito and a margarita on the rocks that doesn’t cost $20 and I’ll forget about everything else.
8. How often do you get to see Reed?
He’s only just turning two in December, so we haven’t established a regular routine, but so far I see him twice a year. With my schedule working with the school here in Singapore, my vacation times are pretty rigidly set, so I can plan on making a short trip for about 5 days in June, and for a week in December. I have a two week school holiday in December, so I use the rest of the time to spend with my family in TX. Doug and Maura are really great about communicating with me what works for them as far as my visits. They are always welcoming, but we all know that there are boundaries and lines of respect. We all consider each other family, and I stay in their extra room at their house when I visit. Maura is also really good at sending Bill and I monthly updates, always around the 13th of each month which is his birthdate in December. She’s very descriptive in what he’s learning, new tricks he has, and ways his personality is developing. On my end, I keep them updated with the ins and outs in my life, and I send Reed a post card from every place I visit. Maura has gotten him keepsake box where they keep all of my letters and cards to him. In the future, when I leave Singapore to go somewhere else (who knows where), we’ll have to work out another plan for my visits, but I hope to always be able to spend a good week with him at least twice a year.
9. What days are the hardest for you to deal with? Holidays and Birthdays? Or just random days when something will trigger a memory?
Actually, holidays and birthdays are some of the easiest days for me to deal with. Those are times for celebrating, and I love celebrating Reed’s life, my life, and everything rolled into them both. It’s the random moments that hit me hard, like one day when I saw a little boy sitting on the bus in his mother’s lap. They were both just staring out the window, not doing anything cute or entertaining, but her pinky finger was stroking his ankle and he was absent mindedly twirling her hair between his fingers. They seemed to be such a part of each other, and I had to take deep breaths to keep from losing it in the middle of the crowded bus. I know I made the best decision for the both of us, and there are times when I look at my life and think about how much I love it and wonder if I ever come across as cold towards Reed because I’m so thankful for the direction I’m going because of my decision not to parent him. But make no mistake, there are days when it is hard. When I feel his absence so strongly and I cry so much and so hard that it feels like even my knuckles and my knee caps are about to turn into tears. These times aren’t often, and they are never accompanied with regret or remorse, but when they do come, it has been when I’m walking along a beach, sitting on a bus, or just thinking about him alone in my room.
10. If you could only wear one pair of shoes for an entire year, what would they be?
My Teva Kayenta sandals. They are comfortable, cute, waterproof, have traction, slip on and off easily, and look good in shorts, jeans and skirts. The perfect shoe for living on a very hot and rainy equatorial Asian city where you have to take your shoes off several times a day! Unfortunately they aren’t made anymore, so the pair I have now I had to order used off of ebay.
11. Tell me about your family. Did you grow up in the States in one home for your entire childhood, or were you in a family that moved around a whole lot?
I’m the middle child of 5 children, one boy and all the rest girls, and we definitely didn’t move around! From the age 4-10 we lived in a huge, white, beautiful, Victorian style house in a very small, rural town in Texas. Then my dad’s oil business went under, as did the businesses of many oil men in the 1980′s, and we lost everything and moved into a huge, old, gray, tired farm house a few miles outside of the same little rural TX town. I was there mostly with just my mom and sisters until I went to college. We barely had enough money for food, so traveling or vacationing was out of the question. A big splurge at our house involved a two liter bottle of soda and a gallon of ice cream. We all had jobs when we were 16 if not before, bought our own cars, and paid our own way through college (or are still paying for it). Travel for me didn’t come until much later in life, when I realized that, just as I don’t have to be tied to the idea of making enough money or not having enough, I don’t have to be tied to the idea of being poor and thinking that I have to miss out on everything.
12. With you being nomadic, what caused you to want to live this way?
I guess it just happened. Like many people say of their carreers, I kind of fell into it. I had started leaving TX during the summers to teach pottery at a girls camp in NC, and had done that for 3 summers. At the end of the third summer, I was 27 years old, had a degree but no job, was drowning in debt that I couldn’t pay off, had just spent a hellaceous year in gradschool that I wasn’t going to be returning to, and felt my life was in shambles. The only thing I felt that I had going for me was the amazing friends and family I had back in TX. While I was still at the summer camp, when I thought about going back there I would get a nauceous feeling in my stomach. I compared my life at summer camp with my life in Denton; I didn’t have to cook, clean, drive, pay rent, buy food, have a nice wardrobe, furnish a house, pay bills (new ones, anyway), and I could just do my job, have fun, while living in a beautiful place, and got a paycheck at the end of the summer. I started wondering if I could find something else similar to that, and my search led me to Zion National Park in Utah. Once I got there, I met other people who had been living this kind of lifestyle for months or years, and I loved it. I had lived my whole entire life worring about money, stressing about things I needed to do, how to fit everything into the little free time I had. Once I started traveling and working, my stress crumbled away, I was able to make money and pay off my debt, I didn’t have to rely on things like a car and insurance and a house, I met new and interesting people, and things in my life that I hadn’t even realized had become stale suddenly became revitalized. I realized how much I had been trying to do what others expected of me, or at least what I though they did, instead of trusting my own faith and my own heart. After a few months in Zion, I went back to TX, took everything out of my storage unit, had a big garage sale where I sold everything I had, and then left with two duffle bags to go to Hawaii to work on a cruise ship. From there I went back to the summer camp, back to Zion, back to the cruise ship, back to the summer camp again, to San Diego, to a ski resort in Crested Butte Colorado, to Denali National Park in Alaska, to a lodge on the beach near the Hoh Rainforrest in Washington state, back to Colorado, back to Alaska, and then finally to North Carolina where Reed was born. The nomadic lifestyle fits me like an old pair of jeans. It’s not for everyone, in fact very few are comfortable with it for any extended period of time. But it works for me, and I have yet to find a reason to stop. Living in Singapore for as long as I have, a year and a half, has been a huge change for me since the longest I’ve lived anywhere since starting my travels in 2005 had been 6 months. I do love it here, but my traveling feet still get itchy. Thankfully, Singapore is an easy springboard to travel to the many beautiful surrounding countries, and my job gives me enough time to make good use of the central location and cheap plane fares.
13. You mentioned that you are involved with Meetup.com, what kind of groups are you involved in? Are you a member of groups that are all over the world or just in the local area that you currently live?
Meetup.com is a site I found when I first moved to Singapore, didn’t know a single person here, and was looking for something to do and ways to meet people. As I was thinking about what I wanted my new life here to look like, one thing I decided was that I wanted to read more, and that it would be cool to have other people to talk about books with. For the past few years I had been trying to read ‘the classics’ whenever I happened across one in a give-away pile where ever I was working, so I had the idea of starting my own book club to read through some of the books that are considered the best of all time, books that have shaped and influenced cultures, books that any well-read individual should have under their belt. I thought maybe a few people would be interested and that we could sit in a quiet little corner of a cafe and chat and talk about the book we had decided to read. But now, a year and a half and 16 books later, there’s over 500 members on our online site and for the upcoming meeting for this month there are almost 45 RSVP’s. Yikes! Where do I find a place to hold a meeting of 45 people?!? The good news is that not everyone shows up, so it will be more like 25-30, which is still a lot. It’s one of my favorite things about being in Singapore; I always have a good book to read while I’m on the train or sitting waiting for someone, and the discussions are great. I’m amazed at how much I learn from other people, how much we all learn from each other, and the deeper appreciation and understanding we have about the book after the discussions. Besides my own book club that I started, I’ve also joined some social groups and wine tasting groups. It’s been a great way to meet people; I met my best friends here through a wine tasting meetup. I don’t know how much it’s used in the US, but it seems to be pretty popular in Singapore.
14. Did you attend college after high school? If so, where did you attend and what was your focus?
Immediately after high school I went to the University of North Texas in Denton, a suburb of Dallas. The first two years I didn’t know what I wanted to do so I just took the minimum amount of basic courses. Finally I decided on a degree in Social Work, but at the same time I got involved in my ceramics classes. I ended up with a minor in ceramics, but I spend so much time in the studio there that everyone thought I was an art major. I’ve never used my degree, except as just a piece of paper that says I have one (which can be useful, like when I had to have it to get this job in Singapore), and don’t think I will in the future.
15. If you could go anywhere in the world that you have not been yet, where would you go?
For some reason, I’ve always wanted to go to India. I’ve heard a lot of the good, the bad and the ugly; the crowded streets of the big cities, the filth, poverty, etc., and it all makes me want to go there more. As it stands, my plans are to spend a few months there after I leave Singapore at the end of next year, but plans often change and I never know what will happen. I am going to try my best to get there though.
So as you can see…we both had fun with this project as being the interviewer or the interviewee. Please post your comments as I know that Rachel will be checking this post as well! In addition to the interview questions here are some pictures of Rachel.
