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Clemencia Deleon: Truth-Telling & Emotional Intelligence in a Kinship Adoption

You tell a small lie or you keep the truth out of something, and your intention is to go back and tell the truth. But then you forget, or you get comfortable in that missing truth part, and it just gets bigger and grows.

And so it was this energy that was accumulating. Nobody was saying anything about until I was like,
“I can’t do this anymore. I have to tell him.”

Clemencia Deleon, birth mom in a kinship adoption —

Imagine you are 18 years old and parenting a 4 month old boy, a path you don’t feel prepared for or supported in at all. You have an older half-brother; he and his wife have been struggling to conceive. You end up placing your baby with them in what is agreed to be an open adoption.

But in practice, it’s not open. Sure you have contact at family get-togethers. You get to see him. But years later, his parents have declined to tell him that he was adopted and that you are his birth mom. As he grows older, you are pressed to either stay complicit with this lie of omission, or spill the beans without their permission.

In this new podcast episode of Adoption: The Long View, Clemencia Deleon tells her story of a kinship adoption gone wrong, her quest for emotional intelligence over the years, her moment of truth in finding her voice, and lessons learned to share with you.

Episode 107: Clemencia Deleon on Emotional Intelligence in Adoption

You may remember Clemencia from her two guest posts, All the Feels and the Back Story and the Breaking Point.

Clemencia has also become an integral person in producing my podcast, as she has added the transcript feature to each episode and she creates the shareable microcontent memes you see here. If you don’t already follow Clemencia on her social media channels, listed in the Show Notes below, make sure you do.

Ep107: My Not-So-Open Kinship Adoption

In this episode, Clemencia reveals:

  • How to end up in a closed kinship adoption despite your best intentions.
  • The connection between mother and baby and what can happen when it is wished away.
  • How easy it is for a birth mom to lose her voice in an adoption, and the ramifications to the child and others when that occurs.
  • What happened in her intense Moment of Truth, when Clemencia could no longer perpetuate the 10-year lie of omission.
  • What might have prevented the situation in the first place.
  • Her best piece of advice (asked of all guests).

Prefer to read? Here’s a transcript, thanks to Clemencia!

Show Notes from Clemencia Deleon’s Episode on Emotional Intelligence

How to Tune In Regularly

Podcast for Adoption: The Long View

You can find us on Adopting.com, and on these and other platforms.

A new episode comes out the first Friday of the month. Thank you for sharing, subscribing, and rating this episode!

guide to living in open adoption

Lori Holden, mom of a young adult daughter and a young adult son, writes from Denver. She was honored as an Angel in Adoption® by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute.

Her first book, The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption: Helping Your Child Grow Up Whole, makes a thoughtful anytime gift for the adoptive families in your life. Her second book, Standing Room Only: How to Be THAT Yoga Teacher is now available in paperback, and her third book, Adoption Unfiltered, is now available through your favorite bookseller!

Find Lori’s books on her Amazon Author page and catch episodes of Adoption: The Long View wherever you get your podcasts.

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