The Adoptee Experience of Subtraction & Division: What Parents Must Know
In this much anticipated episode, we resume our conversation with adoptee and adoption educator Torie DiMartile. We cover:
- the adoption math that adoptees must deal with;
- the worlds adoptees must precariously straddle throughout their lives;
- the opposing emotions adoptees continually experience, which leads to confusion and misunderstandings;
- and how adoptive parents can either help or hinder an adoptee’s efforts to heal all these splits.
As you may recall, last time we stopped partway through our conversation to save the rest for later. Well, later is now here.
About Torie DiMartile
Victoria (Torie) DiMartile is a speaker, consultant, and cultural anthropologist. As a biracial Black transracial adoptee, she was raised in Kentucky in a white Italian American family. She is the founder of Wreckage and Wonder LLC, a small business that educates prospective white adoptive and foster parents and provides webinars and training to adoption and child welfare organizations.
Torie has been featured on podcasts such as the Honestly Adoption Podcast, The Adoptee Nextdoor, and participated on panels and given presentations at conferences such as Replanted Conference, INSIGHT Conference, and The Families Rising Conference.
Torie is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Indiana University working towards a dissertation titled “Transracial Adoption in the Age of #GeorgeFloyd: Race and Kinship in U.S. Adoption.”
Torie’s personal life and academic pursuits have made her passionate about addressing racism within the domestic and international adoption industries and advocating for family preservation and reproductive justice. She was recently named an Indiana University Griffin Graduate Pathways Fellow for Summer and Fall 2023 where she worked with adoption agencies and post-placement organizations to improve adoptive family education and create adoptee and birth parent centered programming.
She currently coordinates the Activism in Adoption speaker series for On Your Feet Foundation and volunteers locally in Bloomington, IN as an expert witness in family court cases and a consultant for small family-centered non-profits designing staff trainings around race, adoption, and foster care.
In her free time Torie loves to go on walks with her rescue dog, Rowdy, draw portraits, and play with her three nephews.
Ep 506 about Adoption Math
In ep 506, Torie addresses the cultural, racial, and familial divides adoptees must continually navigate, not to mention emotional divides, as well. Torie reflects on how her own coming to consciousness affected her parents—and her relationship with her parents. What happens when an adoptee becomes the expert on the adoptee experience and is faced with becoming their parent’s teacher? How can such a shift in power dynamics affect the parent-adoptee relationship?
Torie explains the connection between her chosen field of anthropology and the ways we tell stories about adoption. And she reminds parents that by opting into adoptive parent, we have already committed to being tested in ways we could not foresee.
All this and more in ep 506 about adoption math. You don’t want to miss one word of Torie’s observations and insights.
Show Notes for ep 506 with Torie DiMartile
- Keep up with Torie’s professional, scholarly, and community-based projects via her website www.wreckageandwonder.com.
- Article: Love is Not Enough: What it Actually Takes to Raise Transracial Adoptees
- Torie and her mom in the trenches
- Torie and Angela Tucker on the white savior narrative
- More on Adoptee Math via Lori’s NCFA article (p6)
- More on the Math of Openness in Adoption Unfiltered (p163)
- Mentioned: The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption
- Episode 506 transcript
How to Tune In Regularly
You can find Adoption: The Long View on Adopting.com and on these other platforms.
- Spotify
- Apple Podcasts
- Amazon Podcasts
- Castbox
- Search for “Adoption Long View” on your preferred podcast platform.
A new episode comes out the first Friday of the month. Thank you for sharing, subscribing, and rating this episode wherever you listen!
