Transcription of “Fostering Family Connections” #157
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show #157 “Fostering Family Connections” airing for the first time on Sunday, September 14, 2014. Families come in many forms. Regardless of how they are created, they have a significant impact on our later lives. Today, we speak with Christina Baker Kline best-selling author of the Orphan Train and business woman Catherine York. Their family experiences have greatly influenced their work and personal evolution. We hope you enjoy our conversations with Christina and Catherine. Thank you for joining us.
Anybody who listens to the radio show on a regular basis knows what a big reader I am and one of my favorite things to do is to pick up a book, read it, find myself completely engaged and then get the chance to meet the person who wrote the book that had me spellbound for hours at a time. Today, we have that individual with us today. This is Christina Baker Kline. She is a novelist, nonfiction writer and editor who wrote the number 1 New York Times best seller Orphan Train as well as Bird in Hand, The Way Life Should Be, Desire Lines, and Sweet Water. Christina lives with her family in Montclair, New Jersey, and spends summers on Mount Desert Island. Thanks so much for coming in and talking with us today.
Christina: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.
Dr. Lisa: This book is truly a great book. I really enjoyed it in part because of the writing. Obviously, the writing is great, but also it is such an interesting story, The Orphan Train. Tell people who are listening who may not have read it before what this book is about.
Christina: Yeah. Okay. My novel is about a 91-year-old woman who lives on the coast of Maine. She’s a wealthy widow in a big old house, and the 17-year-old girl who comes into her life who is a troubled Goth part Penobscot Indian foster kid who’s had a really hard time of it steals a book from the library and has to do community service. She comes to work for this old woman, and her job is to help clean out the attic. Her attitude is that she just wants to get it over with because she thinks they have nothing in common, and it’s just this old woman who has a lot of money and really doesn’t look anything like her, act anything like her either.
Over the course of the novel, however, as she begins to unpack the boxes, she realizes that this woman has a hidden past as an orphan train rider, and not only that, which I’ll explain in just a second but they also come to understand that they have a lot more in common then they ever would have imagined in terms of the kind of childhood that they both share. Through their friendship they discover things about themselves that they never would have known. The Orphan Train is a kind of incredible piece for American History that’s been hidden in plain sight. 250,000 children, perhaps more even were sent from the East Coast to the Mid West over 75 years. It was the largest migration of children in our nation’s history from 1854 to 1929, and very few people know about it, and it was a labor program.
The children were between the ages of 2 and 14 years old, and they were sent to the Mid West specifically indentured and contracted to work for farmers and other people who chose them randomly. There was no screening process. They were just given to whoever showed up. They had to line up by height and they stood on platforms and people tested their muscles and their teeth and made them run in place, and it really was … In some ways it resembled a slave auction. The children aged out at 18, but until then they were the property of the people who took them. It’s a chilling and surprising bit of our own past, again, that we don’t tend to know much about.
Dr. Lisa: My children learned about the Orphan Train when we went to Ellis Island, and actually your book is referenced when you go to the Ellis Island Museum, and they were surprised to hear about it too, and the bigger surprise wasn’t that there were orphan children that were moved across the country although that is horrifying enough, but also that some of these children weren’t orphaned at all. Some of these children were just taken off the streets, and I guess called orphans.
Christina: The Orphan Train movement actually it’s a misnomer because only about 30% of them were orphans. The rest were abandoned, they were taken out of homes, they were run aways, and they were actually plucked off the streets. Parents would caution, poor parents would caution their children not to go out after 6 because they might be picked up by the police and put into an orphanage and taken on to a train. Yes, a lot of them had parents who were alive and what happened is that the children were told that their pasts began when they got on to the train. They had no parents, they had no families, they had no past. They weren’t allowed to think or talk about it. They were told, “Your life begins now.”
The chaperones, they often were given new names. Their birth certificates were altered, destroyed and locked up, and they were allowed no access. Often times, even parents would show up on a train station platform, and want to either take their children back or give them something to identify themselves so they could find them later, give them a letter or something. I actually went through an archive of those materials at New York Public Library. They were not given to the children, they were taken from them, and they were, the parents were turned away. Once the decision was made by an orphanage to put the children on the train, there was no turning back, and the parents weren’t allowed to take them.
Dr. Lisa: You described children who were quite young. Some of these kids were actually placed in the care of older children and just sat on the trains and then moved out, and they were separated from all that they had ever known from a very young age.
Christina: Yeah. As I mentioned obviously 2-year-olds aren’t going to be working in the fields right or in the household as girls tended to do, but by 4, young children were working. Poor … You have to remember that in the 1850s when this started and actually all the way up through children were property, and poor children were labor. Pure and simple. Poor children worked whether it was on a farm or in New York. The concept was humanitarian actually. The man who came up with this was a Methodist minister named Charles Loring Brace and his idea was philanthropic.
He wanted to get these poor children off the streets because there was no social mobility, there was no welfare, there was no foster care, there were no child labor laws, no child welfare laws, no protection for the poor, no safety net, and no social programs of any kind. It was a [inaudible 00:08:54] situation for many, many immigrants and these children were dying of disease and starvation, exposure. They were going to prison, they were becoming prostitutes, they were headed nowhere good, they were joining games, and Brace looked around and saw that there were 30,000 children on the streets of New York literally homeless living on the streets like India.
Like what we think of or the [inaudible 00:09:15] London we tend to think of, but actually New York was really similar to the London in the mid 1900s, and so these children had no where to go. The orphanages were over crowded. When Brace’s orphanage, which was called the Children’s Aid Society got too full, they housed children in the jail with prisoners. You can imagine how advantageous that was. He had this kind of fresh air find idea. He thought let’s get the children on to these bucolic farms with sheep dotting the meadow and big red barns and wrap around porches on white farmhouses.
He had this idealized way of what it would be like, where he thought get some healthy fresh air and get them off the streets. Furthermore, he was Methodist, and his intention was also, he also had this sort of evangelical bent. He wanted to get this [inaudible 00:10:04] Jewish, catholic, non-practicing children into good solid protestant preferably Methodist homes. He sent them to the Mid West, and the truth is I must say that even though many of these children knew that they were labor, they went into homes where they perhaps had rocky transitions.
Eventually, I would say and the train riders themselves say, and by the way as I say out of 250,000 train riders there are now more than 4 million descendants, so there is all the research being done about the train riders now, but they say that they probably ended up better off than they would have if they’d stayed in New York. Even though now you consider that it’s a fairly barbaric idea to send children without any screening and any real oversight onto trains to the mid west to random homes, I think ultimately they lived, most of them. They eventually found their footing and the vast majority of train riders not only stayed in the states that they were put into, but they stayed in the small communities that they landed in.
As one train rider said to me, I have been through so much turmoil I just wanted to stay put.
Dr. Lisa: The main character or one of the main characters in the book is actually a modern child who is being taken out of a family situation, and put into a different family situation, so there is a parallel there with the woman, the older woman that she meets that is a train rider.
Christina: That’s right. I work with a lot of foster care organizations now, since the book came out, and there is a foster child in it, but I also did a lot of research and I have friends who’ve taken in foster children. I know that even though … Actually I did a benefit the other night and a former foster child had this book. He was so amazing and he was about 21, and he came up to me at the end because I spoke as well, and he said “the situation of the train riders is a unique thing, but I have to tell you reading your book the feelings I had as a foster child are the same. The circumstances are different but the feelings you have being displaced, feeling unwanted and unloved and that you don’t have a home is exactly the same way it felt to me.” When I wrote the book I actually wasn’t calculated about the connections. I stumbled into their relationship having these resonances. Instinctively I felt that having this 91-year-old woman like many train riders had never told her story, and I didn’t think that she would tell it to just anyone. I thought it would have to be someone who was sort of on the social fringes may be who wouldn’t be asking the normal questions or just politely wanting to know but instead would have a motivation for asking.
That’s how I came up with the idea of Molly, this character, and there were many other reasons that I chose this, the Penobscot Indian angle and all of that stuff. My mother was very involved with [inaudible 00:13:19]. She was a state legislature in Maine. I grew up in Maine, so I was drawn to her, I think unconsciously understanding a bit there were connections, but as anybody who writes fiction knows you often don’t know why you’re writing a story until you are telling it. The writing begets the revelations. It’s usually not the other way around that you calculate it. They kind of figure out what the elements are and put them into the story.
You often have to follow you instincts and trust that you’re being led somewhere that will be fruitful and that’s what happened to me in this book. The connections between them only became obvious as I wrote my way into the story.
Dr. Lisa: You are on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast. We’ve long recognized the link between health and wealth. Here to speak more on the topic is Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
Tom: Sometimes I meet with married or partnered clients, and when we get to talking about their financial lives, a cultural divide bubbles to the surface. One person feels one way about their money and the other seems to be on their own financial island with a set of beliefs and rules that have created unnecessary borders and boundaries. It’s not an uncommon thing, and when I hit those situations I do my best to help both people understand that neither is a 100% right or wrong, but they simply have to take a step back and look at their own financial life in a new light. It is also true in politics and economics. What we need to do is see money as a living thing that can be used to grow our lives together without disagreement or so called border issues. It’s a great feeling for me. It’s like I’m helping people negotiate peace treaties with their money. Be in touch if you want to know more. Tom at Shepard Financial, Maine. We’ll help you evolve with your money.
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Dr. Lisa: As a result of the success of Orphan Train you’re being asked to do many events lots of community reads, and it’s seems as though this has really touched people in a big way. Why do you think that’s true?
Christina: I thought about that a lot because this is my fifth novel and honestly I like them all, and the other ones have done pretty well, but nothing on the scale of this novel, which has sold a million copies. It’s a completely different experience, and honestly it feels like a fluke to me, and I feel both lucky to experience it and a little overwhelmed. Believe me, I’ve thought about this a lot because when I was writing the book, and I and my publisher had no idea. In fact, I remember at one point they said “Well! We’re not sure that you’re going to, after I finished it, if you’re going to hit the demographic because you’ve got this odd 17-year-old and then this cranky 91-year-old and who’s going to read about those people. We don’t know”.
It kind of unfolded slowly and in fact the book has been out for over a year, and it climbed the best seller list slowly and then it just hung on. It’s been kind of slow build. I think the truth is that a lot of people are interested in this story about America that they didn’t know. I have a lot of men who come to events and who say they never have read any of my books, and thought that they were women’s books, and that now with this historical angle they’re interested in it, so there is that aspect. I think, a lot of people are wondering how to handle displaced children in our society. There’s a lot of talk about the foster care system and how to improve it and make it better. I think, there’s that part of the story.
I also think probably that the connection between generations is something that a lot of people are interested in thinking about as people live longer. I have a lot of mother and daughter book clubs who have come up to me at events. I have grandmothers and granddaughters reading the story together, so there is something true about that connection between these unlikely friends that has, I believe, struck a cord. I’m not sure. Do you have any other thoughts on that? Because they’re the ones that come to mind for me.
Dr. Lisa: I think that you probably have hit it. When I read this book, after I was done with it I gave it to my 18-year-old and I also have a 13-year-old daughter, and I said “you really need to read this book” because there was something about it. I think I felt the same thing. I’m not in the mother daughter book club, and she and I don’t always read the same books, but there was something about it I think that the bonds between the two women in the book, and it was sort of a family bond even though the 91-year-old and the 17-year-old weren’t actually related.
Christina: Yeah. Exactly. I’ve heard that a lot. A lot of parents say “it was so wonderful to talk to my girl or boy or children about what it really was like to be a child in that period because they have no idea. These people come up to me at meetings often say “we have a sort of fairly comfortable life, and they just didn’t know that children have not always lived this way”. The idea that children were considered labor, and that there was no such thing as childhood is shocking to people especially you know children who have never really heard about that before.
By children I mean teens really. I would say, 13, I have a number of 13 year olds who have communicated with me, read the book. I would say most readers started around 14, it seems, 14-15 because there are few scenes in the book that are a little disturbing, although not particularly graphic.
Dr. Lisa: You just bought a house in Maine.
Christina: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve roots in Maine. You’re friends with Genevieve Morgan, our former co‑host for the show and also most common a former writer for Maine Magazine. The Maine connection for you is strong. Do you think this in some way contributes to your writing, your passion for writing, your connection to writing, your inspiration?
Christina: Oh my gosh! No question. Maine is my field, is my homeland. I was, we were fairly itinerant when I was young. I was born in England. My parents are southern, there are from North Carolina and Georgia, but when I was 6, we moved here and continued to go and back and forth to England. I lived there 9 years altogether. We lived in the south a few years when I was young. My relatives are all southern, but that’s a really long time. My parents have been here since I was 6. They were at the University of Maine. My mother was, as I mentioned was in the legislature. They retired to Bass Harbor. My mother died a year ago, sadly, really sadly young, 73, of a stroke that was unexpected and it was shocking.
I have three sisters, one of whom lives in Maine year around. We all have made that little corner of Desert Island home. My parents settled there. One sister lives year around with her carpenter husband and her four small children. She’s a librarian at Bass Harbor Memorial Library, and then my other two sisters and I both live with New York and Washington and I live in Montclair just outside of New York, but we all have houses in within 2 miles. We are here as much as we can and actually I love to be here. I bought a house because I want to be here as much as I can during the year. I have two boys who are now, one is entering college this year and one’s a freshman, so they’re launching. Then I have a 14-year-old who is in high school. It’s feeling more possible for me to spend more time here.
My husband and I both love it a lot. He is from the Mid West which is how I was inspired to write Orphan Train. His grandfather was a train rider but this is where we really want to be and where I’m so excited to have a house. I’m really excited.
Dr. Lisa: It’s interesting that you’re kind of hitting your stride, I guess. I haven’t read your other books, I must have been, I will go back and read them now I promise.
Christina: They are all being re-released.
Dr. Lisa: Oh good, good.
Christina: Good covers and looking beautiful.
Dr. Lisa: I’m sure they’re wonderful and I will read them because I do love to read so but it is interesting that you’re hitting your stride at least from a popularity standpoint, just as you’ve, you moving your kids up through the ranks. Yeah, you’ve been a writer even as you’ve been a mother all the way through.
Christina: I’ve been a working writer almost my entire professional. I’ve been a working writer forever. I’ve always written, I have 10 books. I have 5 novels and 5 nonfiction books that I’ve written or edited. I’m doing an anthology now, and I’m writing a new novel that takes place in Maine. I have been a working writer like many, many of my friends and I have done some books have been successes and some have not been so successful but I’ve always taught, I’ve edited, I’ve found a way to have writing as a career, a vocation and an education all the way through. This is a really different thing as I’ve said and now the way the juggling, I’m still juggling as I was before, but I’m juggling different things.
Now I’m juggling how to write my new novel and do appearances and do work for with the body of my work. That’s already happened. Instead of scrambling to edit new things to make money and teach to make money and I love teaching. I have discovered it’s such a cliché that you can have it all, just not all at the same time as they say, and that’s really true for me. The other thing is I’ve always said this but it’s great to be a writer because it’s not like being a super model where you have a shelf life. I can write until I’m 100 and so, and I hope to. I hope to keep writing forever.
It feels like a very, very long distance run and part of the joy for me of this experience with Orphan Train, is that I’ve had so many varied experiences with my books and I, if this had happened to me at the beginning, I just would have no idea what it was like to really persevere when you weren’t sure what was going to happen. Now, I feel I’ve got that body of experience behind me and when I give talks to write to groups of writers or aspiring writers, I still have a lot to share about my own experience and that is something you gain with age.
Dr. Lisa: Christina what can we look forward to from you in the future?
Christina: My next novel is inspired by the painting Christina’s world by Andrew Wyeth. It is actually her story. It’s written in the first person and she tells the story of what she’s doing in that field and what she’s looking at and what has to do with her very interesting real life story. I’ve been working with several tour heads at the Wyeth house in Cushing, Maine. I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on, and I’ve discovered that her story, her ancestry, how they got to Cushing and how she ended up there and what her passions were and how they manifested themselves is so interesting that you almost don’t need to write a novel about it but I am. I am writing a novel. I’m using as much as I can from her real life.
Dr. Lisa: Well, I look forward to that and I know that people who are listening also will look forward to it and also anybody who has not yet read Orphan Train, I highly recommend it. How the people find out about your work, Christina?
Christina: Well, actually on my website which is just my name.com christinabakerkline.com or my Facebook author page which is my public page. I have events and if people want to catch up with me in the summer, I’ll be doing some events with Ayelet Waldman who has a new novel called Love and Treasure in Maine, I’ll be doing that. Also on my website, I have a tab called Book Pubs and it has tons of information about the nonfiction aspect of Orphan Train and I also answer the top 10 questions that people tend to ask.
Dr. Lisa: We are so pleased that you’re able to come into our studio, talk with us today. For people who know the show, you may know that we schedule people far in advance and we actually just accidentally called you up and got you to come in at the last minute, so we’re really privileged to have you here. We have been speaking with Christina Baker Kline, novelist, nonfiction writer, and editor, and author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Orphan Train. Thank you so much for coming in.
Christina: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Lisa: As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth, Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci. When asked, most of my clients say the same thing about what keeps them up at night, money. Making certain cash flow is there to meet day-to-day operational needs. Oh my gosh! Is pay roll going to be able to make it? When we dig deeper, we understand that those sleepless nights are symptoms of poor planning and forecasting. More often than not, the reasons for not doing it are lack of time and lack of resources.
Here’s a suggestion. Instead of living in fear of the numbers and losing sleep over them, make peace with them by paying closer attention to the financial and creating positive cash flow.
I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need, boothmaine.com.
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Dr. Lisa: I think we all have had times in our lives where we’ve spent … We had relationships with people and known them a certain way, known them from a business standpoint or we’ve known them socially. Then we hear more about their stories and it causes us to pause a little bit. This next individual is pretty great person in her own right and just when you first meet her, you will definitely agree. Then when you hear her story, you’ll think, wow there’s something really big going on here and you’ll be even more appreciative of what she’s managed to do in her life.
Catherine York is the cofounder of the Gilded Nut Snack Company where she directs closed strategy and investing. She is originally from Presque Isle and Waterville. Thanks for coming in.
Catherine: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Lisa: Catherine, you guys have great snacks. Let us first start with that because you do this really interesting flavors of pistachios which I love. I can’t get enough of them. I eat them probably far too often.
Catherine: Glad to hear that.
Dr. Lisa: Yes I’m sure, yes. You and John have really done a great job getting the pistachios into stores all over the State of Maine and elsewhere, I’m assuming, why pistachios?
Catherine: Well they’re really John’s creation. We lived in the Virgin Islands for, he lived there for 8 years, lived there for 3 and ½ and that’s where we met. His buddies used to take him out on boat trips and he was always the guy making food because he is an amazing cook. He brings snacks and water amazingly all these guys would get together, nobody ever had water so he brings water and check in [inaudible 00:30:54] all kinds of crazy things. He started making pistachios. He would take these plain pistachios which he really liked but he didn’t love and he’d throw them in a bowl and mix in like he does a salad, trying different concoctions and pulling out whole herbs and spices from his pantry, and that’s how the Gilded Nut was created.
We moved from the islands to San Francisco for the work that I was doing at that time and so our energy, and he thought in San Francisco, the foody town of America if I don’t do this now, I never will. That’s was how it was started. The way it structured, we’re able to really live anywhere and do it so we made a decision to move back home for me after being gone for 20-so years, he was able to pick it up. We’ve had a lot of love from Maine stores and hotels including the Camden Harbor Inn. We’re in a bunch of luxury hotels Ritz Carltons, Mandarin Orientals, etc. around the country.
Dr. Lisa: I believe I first started eating your pistachios may be at the Kennebunkport festival last year. That was how I think I was it and probably a little before that but that really is something different about them. The taste combinations, the spices. They definitely feels very lovingly crafted.
Catherine: Oh thank you. We actually launched them at the Kennebunkport festival. John was working really hard with the folks who were crafting a message on the packaging so forth with the deadline at the Kennebunkport festival so that’s where they were launched. The Kennebunkport collection, hotel collection, [inaudible 00:32:33] resort collection there we go, allowed us to put them in all the rooms so that all the guests with the festival had a chance to try them. The flavor combinations of John’s, he literally started with let me add a little paprika, let me try smoked paprika, and Hungarian paprika, so he tried different combinations aside from sea salt and pepper that all he needed to his creations.
Dr. Lisa: Why is it called Gilded Nut?
Catherine: Pulp and Wire around the corner helped us with the name development and we wanted something that was fun. We also wanted to demonstrate through a name the fact that we were taking nuts or snacks and other healthy snacks in the future and coating them with different things that would be healthy and the healthy aspect of it is the most important thing for us. We only use whole ingredients. We never use any preservatives or dextrose, maltodextrin, and those crazy ingredients which many of them have, are GMO derivatives or have or come from things like corn or soy which are big GMO no-nos. That’s a very important facet of the business for us.
Dr. Lisa: Food is important to you. I know that not only was John providing food for your sailing trips, boating trips around the Virgin Islands, but you also were providing food. Food is, the growth of food has become important to you as well. You’re investing in a company that’s doing some interesting work.
Catherine: Absolutely. They’re by 20-50 weeks backed or should I say, professional, how would professionals expect that there will be 10-11 billion people in the world and 70% of those people will live in urban areas. The way we grow food now is unsustainable. The fact that in the wintertime, you and I get our leafy grains from California is a problem because of the carbon footprint because it’s grown to be picked early, it’s grown to be shipped, to be bounced around.
Usually even when it’s organic it’s not necessarily as healthy as it can be. After a lot of research, I decided to invest in a company that’s out of another ones with a technology development that’s out of another ones to grow leafy greens under LED lights vertically inside. We can take modular units and put them into anywhere else in the world which means we can grow sustainably in urban areas.
Dr. Lisa: The name of the company that’s going to be forthcoming with this June?
Catherine: The name of my company is Constant Harvest which the brand company are helping me with. The hope is that I will be, I will have the North America license for that technology.
Dr. Lisa: This is exciting work that you’re doing and clearly something that you’ve been very thoughtful about and very, I guess, the word is mindful of the impact that you have not only in the smaller level of the business but also in the larger world. How did some of this come from your background? I know that you spent time being raised by a family that really had a dedication to bigger, bigger things. Tell me about that.
Catherine: I think part of that first comes from growing up in [inaudible 00:35:55] County. I grew up picking potatoes as a young kid and back then … It doesn’t happen anymore, but back then kids in grade school, junior high school, and high school picked potatoes. I can still feel the dirt under my fingernails and remember what that’s like helping a community get through a harvest as a young person. That was part of it. The other part of it was, I from a very early age as long as I was in the 8th grade, spent time in various foster homes and eventually was taken into a long-term foster care home by a family which became my family. They are my family. We never went through a formal adoption process.
They’re the most giving people I know. One of the best stories is that when Halloween would come around in our neighborhood, the kids would toilet paper every house and they would never touch ours, because my dad was such a person that if any of the trouble kids had any issues at home, they would come and spend the night at our house or come for a meal or something like that. The importance of giving back and doing the right thing and helping others whether it’s through a bigger picture goal, through food, or by just volunteering my time, those things are important to me.
Dr. Lisa: I noticed in my conversations with you and in my friendship with you, that family is a big deal. We just had a conversation on the sidewalk about all people have visited you over the summer in Maine, and yet, you wouldn’t have it any other way. This is really important to have your nieces and nephews and all of the people that enrich your life. You talk about being in foster homes from an early age. That is, first of all very purposeful thing that your doing is surrounding yourself with people that you care about for sure.
Catherine: I think it’s something that’s evolved. Certainly as a very young kid, I came from a home where there was a lot of chaos. My biological mother who still lives in Presque Isle was an immigrant from the Philippines, didn’t have a lot of resources, was divorced here early after she came here, had three kids and didn’t really know how to make things work for young people. I think it was really tough for her. Around my junior high school years, I was having a lot of trouble in the school. I was getting straight As and I was an athlete but I was also causing trouble. I was the class clown and I probably at that time had the most attentions for girls which at that time I’m sure I was very proud of. That was a reflection of needing attention.
We always see young people who are troubled and people want to be around the kids that are good or speak well or doing well in school but really the kids who need the attention are the ones who are acting up because they’re acting up or out because they’re not getting the attention they need elsewhere in their lives. I think that for me it was the way I got attention was going through school and different programs and so forth, trying to get attention. I later learned that I wanted positive attention so I really focused on my studies and another things that were more positive and by being taken in by this family, they helped to impress the importance of that on me and showed me what it was like to have a family.
This is a long answer to your question but that journey was so important for me being without a family structure and then having a family structure which is very foreign to me. Even through high school, I was still trying to figure that out, I was with them through high school, but it was weird having structure. It was weird having people who went to my games and who cared and it really transformed me as a person, as a young person without me really even knowing it. When I went away to college, I’ll never forget. I was so excited to be there and be on my own and have this new independence and so when my parents left, I was excited, and so I don’t remember crying.
My mother called me several days later and said, “I wanted to talk to you because I just wanted to make sure we’re going to hear from you again because I felt like that departure was a little cold and aloof” and I thought, “Wow, this is the warmest they’ve ever been.” It was that moment for me that I realized that I needed to give more of myself to not just take the love that they were giving me but give more of myself. That process helped transform me in a way that allowed me to have better relationships. That was when I became closer with my aunts and uncles and other folks like that.
Dr. Lisa: It seems as though, it probably was a survival mechanism that you had embraced as you were going through this chaotic situations that you needed to be self-protective. You didn’t necessarily want to reach out or be as affectionate because then maybe you just get taken away suddenly as wonderful as your foster family was, how could you know any other way of existing.
Catherine: Yeah, it was absolutely a defense mechanism as was acting out and the other things that I was getting involved in. When you go through foster care and you don’t know where you’re going to be the next day, you don’t want to form relationships. In fact, those weren’t great experiences as much as that the Maine State Foster System allowed me to meet my eventual family and allow me, excuse me, to how the life that I now have. They were experiences along the way that weren’t positive. I had to become detached and aloof so that I could protect my state of mind and my emotions and so forth and so, that’s why I say when I finally moved out with them and met them, I felt like I was the warmest person ever. That wasn’t necessarily the case from their perspective. I had to get to an even point at some point.
Dr. Lisa: As the mother of three kids, two of whom are older, I actually can relate to your, to the woman who became your adopted, unofficially adopted mom because I think sometimes even teenagers who have the most ideal situations, they just do what teenagers do and they’re like, okay, see ya, bye bye. I agree with you that there is some needing to come back around and especially in situations like yours and understand how we impact those people around us. I think when you’re younger all you ever think about is how you’re impacted by what’s going on. As you get older you realize, oh-oh, I actually have some, there’s something that I’m doing that contributes to whatever is going on in the world. I think for you it’s really interesting because you had semi-typical leader team age but you were also dealing with some other stuff that you’re carrying with you for many years.
Catherine: Yeah for sure. I don’t need to say that the evolution of becoming a better, more connected person to my family was overnight or even at that moment. I think that was a moment of realization. I still think in my early 20s where I was still, I think we’re all still discovering ourselves. I was very focused on my career and on success and I was working in politics at that time on the presidential election and worked at the DNC in doing all these things. It was about achievement but it was about achievement for the sake of achievement to show people that I could do things. Great book called Drama of The Gifted Child by Alice Miller, and I read it actually when I was 26.
It was like wow. It was a life bubbling off because she talks about that how you can become a little narcissistic or achievement oriented for the sake of that and after I read the book, I realized that, that if I lost all of that, there’d be nothing left. I needed to find a way to have more balance in my life and that was a journey. It didn’t even happen right after I read the book. It was a journey of self-discovery of wellness, being healthier, making better decisions about my lifestyle, about my relationships, both family relationships and relationships with men and a lot of writing. [inaudible 00:45:08] I did tons of write …
I’ve kept a journal since I was 3 and I just got tons of things on paper and go back and read and go, “Oh gosh! Really? Was I that person at that moment?” I think through that process, through a lot of reading and research and understanding the impact of those things that happened to the little girl, me as a little girl and how it impacts you as an adult person, helped me find better balance. It still is important to me to do well in work or business but that didn’t have to come up at a price of not having strong friendships or relationships or just being … I had become the friend or the girl friend that everyone wanted as opposed to who I wanted to be.
Finding that balance was really tough but it’s a work in progress even today.
Dr. Lisa: The bad idea that you would may be even more than the average individual need to be the person that everybody else wanted to be is that you had to play roles depending from whatever given situation you were in starting from 8th grade or may be even earlier and then finally coming to a place where you’re like “Who am I?” and what does this mean and how do I change things so that my life moves forward in a more authentic way. That’s something lot of people don’t get to … Who don’t have to do all of the work that you’ve had to do over the course of your journey.
Catherine: I don’t even recall who gave me the book. I had a couple of moments that happened to me as a 20ish person and I had some really good mentors, business or work mentors who became personal mentors who had really balanced lives and I think that they saw some of those things in me and had conversations with me. It’s always these touch points in life where you might not realize that something you said or did really can transform a person in that moment. I had those kinds of touch points I think in my 20s which is what led me back to my writing, led me to read that book or read some other books and to be on this train.
I also always wanted to be a better person because of my parents because they set such a wonderful example even now if my mom has an extra dollar in her pocket, she is not spending it on herself. She’s spending it on something for my dad or for her kids or to come up with a new little project my nieces and nephews and that’s just they have given everything to so many people and that’s so admirable, especially in today’s society. Tell about me, me, me, and how many more things can I get and that self-discovery I think is because of the example they have set for me.
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Dr. Lisa: Your father was an educator. He’s retired now I think and that was an important part of creating some stability for you and having this crossover between your home life and your school life was that you had somebody who was paying attention all the way through. This is … I’m asking I don’t know that you can answer this question but why do you think you were so drawn to helping kids who needed that extra something? I mean some, it would be easy to just say, “Come to school. I’m doing my job. When you leave it’s not my problem,” but this was a person he and his wife, your adoptive parents who were unofficial foster parents, adoptive parents, this was a choice that they made. This is how they wanted to live their own lives.
Catherine: I know for my mom it comes from her mom. They both come from families that had meager means but always gave back and so my mom and my aunt, my aunt Gail, are the … literally … When people meet them they’re like “Oh my gosh! They are the nicest people I’ve ever met.” A soft touch to every situation, very thoughtful, super sweet, sometimes giving too much and you’ll have to step back and say, take care of myself. Sometimes we have to do that for them. So I think that comes from their family. For my dad, he came from a little bit of a larger family, again of not many means and he was the tough kid, very athletic but the tough kid, getting into fights but still always a good athlete, good in school, always did well but a typical childhood.
I don’t think anybody else in his family became educated but I think it is something about his experience as a young person finding himself and the things that sports and education did for him caused him to want to do that for others. I don’t know how much of this is environmental that lead you down this path but they just have this special place for young people, for kids, even now. They are both retired, they spend so much time with my cousin’s little babies [inaudible 00:51:58] but they just, they’re really into that childhood development.
Dr. Lisa: It was wonderful to meet your parents last year at the Kennebunkport Festival when you were debuting The Gilded Nut products and it was also wonderful to see how important it was to you that we meet your parents, you know, that you literally walked across the tent and said, Lisa, I want you to meet my parents. That is something that, you don’t always see that kind of closeness and that pride in having that relationship. At the same time you also have a relationship, I think not quite the same relationship with your biological mother who still I believe, lives in the state. I wonder sometimes in situations like this, where there’s not really … You can’t really say somebody is to blame.
You’d like to come up with some reason why your life has gone astray. It’s just so complicated. You have to come to a place of just wherever I am right now, this is where I’m going to be. I wonder if that’s a process that you had to go through yourself so that you could be at a place of peace with this family situation.
Catherine: Yeah I think, well she does still live in Presque Isle, Maine. We don’t really have much contact. I have a younger sister, same mom, so I know what my biological mother is doing more through her because she and I, she lives in Virginia and she and I [inaudible 00:53:21] spend holidays together and so forth. I think as a young person, it’s normal to blame. It’s because of you that this happened and I did a lot of that, lot of finger pointing, lot of I am cutting you off because you are responsible or by doing nothing you were even more responsible. I think during that self-discovery period we talked about earlier, I had to think about her life and how she got there as well.
She is from [inaudible 00:53:53] third world country by so many definitions and even though she had some family members who were really close, others were not. I think it was somewhat of a tough family situation for her too and at the time, that was the early 70s at the time that she ended up coming over to US from the Philippines. It was about escaping the situation that was prevalent in the Philippines, the abject poverty, the lack of jobs, lack of skills training for real jobs and those sorts of things. Really you saw a lot women frankly marry American men and move … or other people in the military from around the world that were stationed in the Philippines during that time, post Vietnam War, who needed to get out, who wanted to get out.
I think her life was all about that. I pointed fingers, I had to spend some time thinking about her life and how she got here and then being here and not … she saw snow for the first time when she came here so Iike think about that. It’s just basic thing and how foreign everything else must have been. I think I had to go through all that and I literally picked up the phone and told her that I forgave her. People always say that forgiveness is lethargic and it was right for me. It doesn’t necessarily work for everybody but it was right for me and I think it was … I think she had put a lot of the things out of her mind and we didn’t meet to get into a discussion about you did this, you did that, didn’t you, now I forgive you. It was more like, the [inaudible 00:55:44] that happened for which I forgive you and that helped bring me a lot of peace.
I’m not sure if it did anything for her but … anyway. My relationship with my parents, they are my parents and so there is not a lot of crossover. I don’t really see my biological mother, I just hear about her through my sister.
Dr. Lisa: Well I appreciate your parents giving you the structure that you needed in becoming your parents when they did. It obviously meant a great deal in your life. I suspected that they impacted other lives of other children in ways that we can’t really know at this point.
Catherine: For sure.
Dr. Lisa: How can people find out about … speaking of your success, how can people find out about The Gilded Nut Snack Company.
Catherine: We are online at www.gildednut.com and if you’re in the Portland area, you can find us at Browne Trading and Leroux Kitchen. If you’re in Camden, at the Camden Harbor Inn, Lily Lupine, and in some Kennebunkport stores as well. I don’t want to go through the entire list but we are available locally but if you have any questions, you can contact us online as well.
Dr. Lisa: I can attest to the fact that these are very lovingly crafted and delicious so as you’re eating them you’re going to feel the positive energy. It’s really something that comes across. Good luck with your future endeavors. I know you’re going to be successful.
Catherine: Thank you.
Dr. Lisa: I thank you for coming in. We’ve been talking with Catherine York, the co-founder of The Gilded Nut Snack Company and so many more things. I appreciate your being with us today.
Catherine: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show number 157, Fostering Family Connections. Our guests have included Christina Baker Kline and Catherine York. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit doctorlisa.org. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each show sign up for our e‑newsletter and Like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as DoctorLisa and catch my daily run photos as Bountiful One on Instagram. We love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. We welcome your suggestions for future shows.
Also let our sponsors know that you’ve heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Fostering Family Connections show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
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Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in Family and Preventative Medicine, acupuncture and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75, Market Street, Portland, Maine. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Susan Grisanti and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Our assistant producer is Leanne Ouimet. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our online producer is Kelly Clinton.
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