Family Proclamations: Exploring Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality Blair Hodges

Caregiving for aging and ill parents can be tough for anyone, but it’s even tougher when it forces you to confront longtime family dynamics of abuse. Sociologist Deborah Cohan blurs the lines between academic research on family caregiving and violence, and her own personal story about a father she calls both adoring and abusive. Her memoir is called Welcome to Wherever We Are: A Memoir of Family, Caregiving, and Redemption.

The path to becoming a parent is complicated for LGBTQ people. Dr. Abbie E. Goldberg has evidence-based advice to help make it happen, debunking stereotypes and increasing the visibility of queer families. Her work can benefit all families. Including yours.

Divorce can be a difficult process today, but it’s nothing compared to what it used to be. In the late 1800s, women from around the country had to fight for the right to separate from their husbands on their own terms. April White tells their stories and how they still impact us today in her fascinating book, ”The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier.”

April White has served as an editor and writer at Atlas Obscura and Smithsonian Magazine. Her historical stories have also appeared in publications including the Washington Post, Boston Globe Magazine and The Atavist Magazine.

Angela Tucker is a Black woman who was adopted by white parents as a very young child. Angela says transracial adoptees like her grow up wrestling with complicated feelings of gratitude and love, but also rejection, loss, and confusion about their heritage. 
Angela is author of “You Should Be Grateful:" Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption. Her family story was featured in the documentary Closure. She has over 15 years of experience working within adoption and foster care agencies, mentoring over 200 adoptees as founder of the Adoptee Mentoring Society. In addition to producing the podcast The Adoptee Next Door, she consulted with NBC’s This Is Us.
 
Transcript
ANGELA TUCKER: As a kid, as a teenager, I only made sense in the city of Bellingham, Washington, if my parents were right nearby. If I'm walking around holding hands with my mom, people would go up to her and say, "Wow, what a great thing you've done." They recognize she has adopted me—"Oh, okay. You're a safe Black person because you're with this woman who did this great thing."
But when I wasn't with my parents, and I'm just a Black girl out in the city, there is confusion, like, "How did you get here? Why are you here? Who are you?"
BLAIR HODGES: Angela Tucker is a Black woman who was adopted by white parents as a very young child. This is called “transracial adoption,” and Angela says adoptees like her grow up wrestling with complicated feelings of gratitude and love, but also rejection, loss, and confusion.
In her new book, Angela invites us to take the perspective of the adopted child and to imagine what it would be like to wonder where you came from, to experience racial confusion, to long for lost connections. She founded the Adoptee Mentoring Society to work with other adoptees and to foster more honest conversations about adoption. She joins us in this episode to talk about her new book: “You Should Be Grateful:" Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption.
There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT ADOPTION TODAY (2:03)
BLAIR HODGES: Angela Tucker joins us. She's author of "You Should Be Grateful": Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption. Angela, welcome to Family Proclamations.
ANGELA TUCKER: Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.
BLAIR HODGES: Let's start with introductions. I borrowed this first question from your book where you describe mentoring transracial adoptees: Please share your name, your gender pronouns, and how you feel about adoption today.
ANGELA TUCKER: My name is Angela Tucker. I go by she/her pronouns. How I feel about adoption today is a huge question.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, I got it from you. [laughter]
ANGELA TUCKER: Wow. Adoption is so complicated. I think in general, society thinks of adoption as really a beautiful thing. That typically comes from the perspective of adoptive parents. My whole work is trying to center the adoptees' perspective on adoption, which isn't necessarily the complete opposite, but it's just a little bit more nuanced than just a fairy-tale-Annie-type story.
BLAIR HODGES: This is a question I see you’ve asked a lot of your counseling groups. You lead sessions with people who are adopted, and you open with this to signal that their feelings might change over time. I think sometimes people get a story about their life and they're just prepared to share that story. When you're sitting down with kids and asking them this question, "How do you feel about it today," their answers may vary. So as a person who has been adopted, where are you at with it today coming into this interview?
ANGELA TUCKER: The question—[laughs] I have never had it turned around on me. But yes, I do ask it of all the people that I mentor, and the reason is just because it's so common that folks put their thoughts about our adoption on us. So I am attempting t

When Jessi Hempel came out of the closet she had no idea her whole church-going family had been hiding in there with her. And things got complicated fast when the closet door kept swinging open. 



Jessi Hempel is author of The Family Outing: A Memoir. She is also host of the award-winning podcast Hello Monday, and a senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn. Her features and cover stories have appeared in Wired, Fortune, and TIME. She has appeared on CNN, PBS, MSNBC, Fox, and CNBC, addressing the culture and business of technology. Hempel is a graduate of Brown University and received a master’s in journalism from UC Berkeley. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife and children.
REFERENCES
Jessi Hempel, "My Brother’s Pregnancy and the Making of a New American Family," TIME (Sept. 12, 2016).








 
Transcript
 
JESSI HEMPEL: I started reading the section about homosexuality and I was like, "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!" Then I thought, "Oh my goodness, they're gonna come home and see me reading it and they're gonna know."
Now I'm, you know, fourteen or fifteen years old. I was so nervous they would discover what I was researching, that I was reading for personal gain, that I was trying to figure something out. So, I immediately turned to the section on menopause because I think, "Well then they'll just think I'm reading for curiosity because there's no way I'm going through menopause."
BLAIR HODGES: Jessi Hempel wasn't going through menopause. She was figuring out she was gay in the late 80s in a family where that wasn't particularly safe. She could keep it hidden for a while, but she knew that someday it wouldn't be a secret anymore, and she was afraid. So, Jessi managed to stretch the secret out.
Then one day, her sister discovers something on their father's computer that will turn the whole family on its head. There was more than one secret closet in this family, and the closet doors would swing open again and again.
In this episode, Jessi joins us to talk about her incredible memoir, The Family Outing.
There's no one right way to be a family, and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.
 
THE FAMILY LEAST LIKELY TO KEEP IN TOUCH (1:38)
 
BLAIR HODGES: Jessi Hempel, welcome to Family Proclamations.
JESSI HEMPEL: Well, thank you so much for having me, Blair. I love what you're doing with the show.
BLAIR HODGES: I'm excited to talk to you about this book, The Family Outing. You're a professional writer, you didn't just write a book because of your amazing experiences. You also have technical skills with this, so people might not think twice about the fact that you've published a book.
But I do think this particular book is sort of surprising if we look at your other professional stuff. Like your career focuses on tech reporting, and this is a really personal memoir. Talk about what it was like to kind of transition to a different mode of writing to get this book done.
JESSI HEMPEL: You're very correct, Blair. For the first 25 years of my life as a writer—and that's a lot of years, by the way, I had been writing for a long time—I thought that if I ever wrote a book it would be about technology, artificial intelligence, or the rise of social networks, or any of the myriad things I geeked out on related to business and tech. I had spent my entire career until that point writing for magazines like Business Week, and Fortune, and Wired about the kinds of things that kept me up at night, which were and are things having to do with things like the evolution of new technology. And that was my identity.
And I start there, Blair, because I think what happened to me actually happened to a lot of people.
In March of 2020—and I should start by saying, if you just say “March of 2020” most people get this dour look on their face, right? Yeah, we can all think about where we might have been. And for me, I was living in Brooklyn, New York. And I was this technolog

One hundred years ago, a bright new age for children was dawning in America. Child labor laws were being passed, public education was spreading, and more. But Adam Benforado says America stopped short in its revolution of children’s rights.