Episode 177: The Black-Market Baby on the Curb Part 2

Content Warning: This episode contains discussions of child trafficking, black-market adoption, childhood abuse, sexual assault, addiction, abandonment, and trauma. Some topics may be difficult to hear. Please listen with care.

She spent decades searching for the truth about where she came from. Finding it only gave her more questions.

In Part Two of Patricia Knight Meyer’s story, the search that began with no birth certificate, no adoption records, and almost nothing to go on finally leads her to the woman whose face looks almost exactly like her own. But meeting her birth mother doesn’t deliver the reunion Patricia had imagined her entire life. Instead, it forces her to confront another complicated truth: finding where you came from doesn’t automatically tell you who you are.

Patricia and Lyndsay explore the expectations we place on reunion, people-pleasing and fear of being abandoned again, learning to set boundaries, and grieving the mother-daughter relationship Patricia could never get back. Then, an unexpected discovery leads Patricia to her biological father—and a relationship that begins to change the way she understands herself, her childhood, and her story.

The conversation comes full circle with Wonderland: Memoir of Black Market Adoption, the memoir born from those discoveries, devastating loss, and Patricia’s determination to make meaning from everything she survived. 

Sometimes the answers you spend your whole life searching for don’t complete your story. They finally permit you to write it for yourself.