.png)
Babes in Bookland
A podcast celebrating women's memoirs, one story at a time!
Babes in Bookland
AUTHOR CHAT: Brittany Penner on Her Memoir "Children Like Us"
What if home isn’t a place you find, but a place you build step by step?
I sit down with author and family physician, Brittany Penner, to unpack Children Like Us: A Métis Woman's Memoir of Family, Identity and Walking Herself Home, her powerful Métis memoir about identity, adoption, and the radical work of healing. From being carried out of the hospital by a social worker to navigating a white Mennonite upbringing, Brittany traces how the Sixties Scoop shaped her beginnings and how lineage still insists on being seen-- in faces, gestures, and the stories that refuse to disappear.
Brittany shares the artistic leap that changed everything: throwing away a 100,000-word draft(!!!) and rebuilding the book through photographs and VHS tapes. We talk about using images to verify memory, honor body knowledge, and write with precision without losing lyric grace. She opens up about medicine too and reveals how tending to her own pain transformed how she advocates for Indigenous women in clinical settings, why believing someone can be the most clinical act of all, and how she protects joy in her creative life so it doesn’t calcify under the weight of systems.
At the heart of this conversation is a simple practice with a profound arc: walking herself home. After a separation that reawakened old losses, Brittany found steadiness in daily walks, watching seasons turn as grief softened. We explore found family, kinship that ignores the word “half,” and the way motherhood reframes generational trauma with tenderness and resolve.
If you’re wrestling with where you belong, how to write your truth, or how to hold hope when hope feels heavy, this episode offers a map that is honest and quietly brave.
If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a quick review. Your words help others find these conversations :) And if you leave a kind review, I might read it at top of show!
Buy Brittany Penner's "Children Like Us"
Transcripts are available through Apple’s podcast app—they may not be perfect, but relying on them allows me to dedicate more time to the show! If you’re interested in being a transcript angel, let me know.
This episode is produced, recorded, and its content edited by me.
Theme song by Devin Kennedy
Special thanks to my new friend, Brittany!
Xx, Alex
Connect with us and suggest a great memoir!
Follow us on instagram! @babesinbooklandpod
Hello and welcome back to Babes in Bookland, your women's memoir podcast. I'm your host, Alex Franca, and I'm so glad that you're here today. Author Brittany Penner joins us to discuss her compelling memoir, Children Like Us, a Metis woman's memoir of family, identity, and walking herself home. Hi, Brittany. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Your memoir is beautifully written. You take us into your world, your confusion, your longing, into lovely moments and heartbreaking ones. And you had to navigate a lot of really difficult moments, information, and feelings at a really young age. And while I can only imagine what sharing your story has done for other children like you, I'm certain that the visibility you offer here will have a positive effect for a community and a people whose stories and history have been too long cast in the shadows. I so appreciated learning your story and hearing your point of view and learning about your family, adopted and ancestral. I'm really excited to chat with you today.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. That was such a lovely introduction. Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. So your memoir has been released in Canada, your home country, for a while, but it comes out today, November 4th, in the United States. What's the response been like?
SPEAKER_00:The response has been overwhelmingly positive, I would say. It's been very surreal, unlike anything that I probably could have anticipated. And yet it's also been, how do I say it? They often say that pub day is a little anticlimactic because you've there's so much to the lead up and so much like going back and forth with your publisher and your publicist and and all of that. And then the book is out and you're just like, okay, it's it's a real thing in the world now. I'll drink my coffee and just wait over here. Yeah, been like that.
SPEAKER_01:In your acknowledgments, you write these beautiful notes to your parents, and they both are like, if you read this, have they read it?
SPEAKER_00:Not that I'm aware of. I don't expect them to. My dad, for all of our faults and all of our strengths, he shoots straight from the hip. And so when I had told him about the book, it was over a year ago now, a year and a half ago, maybe, he had had said, Don't expect me to read it. And it wasn't said angrily or resentfully, it was just said kind of matter-of-factly. It wasn't a tense moment, it wasn't a difficult moment, but I'm thinking that he was probably speaking the truth.
SPEAKER_01:And we will learn more about your dad. But before we get into the meat of your memoir, I'd love to discuss the process of writing it with you. Walk me through what it took for you to call yourself a writer, because you've had quite a career path.
SPEAKER_00:I think I've considered myself at least a little bit of a writer since I was of the age to have a pencil or a crayon in my hand. I remember writing stories as soon as I learned to write. And I would write them often for my Baba, or I would write them in picture form. I found a picture like a almost like a comic strip the other day where I wrote a story about my dad selling bundles of wood that he chopped down in the bush and how he made a bunch of money off of this lumber. And I might have been like seven. Wow. It was supposed to be a very funny story, and it and it is a little funny when you look at it just because it's so cute. And I kind of drew him like Homer Simpson. So I would say I've always had that. And then when I had gotten into university, writing became my way of kind of coping at the end of the day, just trying to process everything that I did from the day. And then into medical school, it became even more of a lifeline in terms of coping because it felt very separate from medicine. And of course, the more I'm in it now, the more I realize how much art and medicine really is intertwined as it should be, in order to kind of give our patients and clients holistic treatment. The two really should be melded and intertwined. But when you're learning such a vast amount of information, it's hard to blend those two worlds. And so for a while it was my way of coping. And then eventually it became my way of connecting with patients in a bit of a different way too.
SPEAKER_01:Your memoir is a search for identity, but seems like maybe you felt comfortable with this identity as a writer from an early age, even if you weren't necessarily articulating that. Without question.
SPEAKER_00:It felt like this undeniable part of who I was, and it was not nurtured and it was not from my environment. I think what I wrote in were little, probably those little notebooks that you would buy for school. So it's not like anyone bought me a journal or a diary, unless maybe my baba bought me one once, my my maternal grandmother. And so it felt very connected to the nature, the DNA part of me, because my parents and my even my baba and everyone in my life, none of them were, none of them were readers, none of them were writers. And so that part of myself felt very innate.
SPEAKER_01:There's an introspection that happens when you're writing right, that sometimes we people they just can't go there. And it seems like you needed to go there for yourself.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, without question. I um often say it like a right to know what I feel and to know what I think, and it unblocks something for me. I love that.
SPEAKER_01:In your acknowledgments, you write that you wrote the majority of this manuscript, your memoir, at a writer's retreat. Can you talk a little bit about that? I would love to go to one of those. I don't know what I'd write, but it sounds awesome.
SPEAKER_00:I was granted a um residency through the Aspen Institute. There's this wonderful couple, Issa Kato and Daniel Shaw, who will host writers throughout some of the summer months. And it's through the Aspen Institute. And I was awarded that in 2023. And so it was three weeks of uninterrupted time in the mountains where you could hear the coyotes howling at night. And if it felt very homey to me because I grew up hearing coyotes at night and it felt like a bit of a full circle moment. It was just this uninterrupted time to write until three in the morning if I wanted to, and then sleep in, and then not sleep if I didn't want to, and just fully focus on writing. And someone had covered my medical practice for about three, four weeks, whatever it was. And so I was at that time, I think I was writing anywhere from three to five thousand words a day.
SPEAKER_02:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:And to be fair, that was coming after months of not writing anything, but that's very reflective of my process. And it's a bit of a unpredictable, chaotic process, but it's mine. And it and it worked. And I wrote at least half, if not two thirds, of the manuscript.
SPEAKER_01:So you were able to, okay, first, what prompted you then to even apply for this grant? And then once you got there, you were able to just kind of turn the faucet on.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. That's incredible. What prompted me was my agent telling me, hey, I think this is worthwhile. I was very thankful to her because I wouldn't have known about it otherwise. And then the way that my brain and psyche work is if I know that my practice, I have a very hard time. And I think this is true for many doctors, or at least many family physicians, which is what I am, I have a very hard time turning off. And so I'll go to bed thinking about something from the day and worrying about a patient whose results were waiting to come back. And I take I carry a lot home with me, which is why I think many people in my practice, at least I hope, feel cared for. But then it also creates a bit of a difficult home environment if you want to write because your mind is not fully there. So for me, those three weeks, I had someone covering my practice, I didn't have to think about it. And that just kind of shut off that part of my brain. And then the other part of my brain was like, finally, okay. And then it just kind of took off.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Sounds like you had a really good support system and you really set yourself up to succeed. Okay, let's back up a little bit. Talk to me about that initial motivation for you to sit down and share your story.
SPEAKER_00:I initially wanted to write a novel, which was basically the story of my life, but in novel form. And I think within like very quickly, I didn't even write much of it. I was just thinking about it. Very quickly, I was like, well, this is just my story. Sometimes stories are told more powerfully in fiction, and sometimes memoir or nonfiction is what the story needs. And this is my story. And that would have been, I would have stopped doing obstetrics in my practice. So I was delivering babies for a few, a few years and doing a lot of call shifts. And so that would have been anywhere from 24 to 48 hours on call, no sleep, pretty busy. Again, it was one of those situations where my brain, this part of me that had been kind of lingering in the background and almost waiting. When I stopped that, it was like, oh yay, finally I get some air. FYI, this is what we're gonna do now. And it just became so loud and so undeniable that I just had to start writing.
SPEAKER_01:I love that it feels like you give yourself permission to listen to yourself in a way that I don't know. I think a lot of people have stories within them, but it can be really scary to share that part of yourself with the world and can also feel really hard to set time aside for you. Like I said in the intro, I really do think obviously your story is for you, but I think I think it's a really important story for a lot of people. Thank you. And knowing it's true gives it an undeniability and a weight that a novelized version doesn't. I really hope so. Okay, so let's have a little fun. Do you have any writing rituals?
SPEAKER_00:I wish I did. I I will say I do love having a candle on, like something I I like feeling cozy that I do. And that being said, sometimes the best writing that I have done is when I am in a waiting room waiting for an appointment and it's unexpected and an idea comes to me, and I just jot it on my phone, and all of a sudden it's like a thousand words later.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. So you're a very good texture with your thumbs, writer. That's great.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Um, I love having a drink beside me, usually iced coffee, sometimes tea. I have a background writing playlist that I that I listen to sometimes. Don't have to, it's not a necessity, but it is there. I usually like having a cat beside me. But again, like sometimes I'll be in the vehicle too, driving and well, not me driving, like my husband's driving, and all of a sudden an idea comes to me and I just have to jot it down. I would love to have a ritual because it would feel a little bit more like something to hold on to. Like, oh, if I just do this, this, this, and this, then I'll get into the right space. And I'm I think I'm just craving that maybe just in general in life. Maybe we all are. I don't know.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think so.
SPEAKER_00:I don't have that one thing, sadly. Or maybe it's not such a sad thing. Just feel sad sometimes.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, it sounds like you have a lot of little things, and then it just seems like you're you really are tuned in in a way that I think is freeing. Cause because sometimes when you have the ritual, I mean that can be really limiting too.
SPEAKER_00:I think so. One of the nice things that have has come from doing a career in medicine, and it's it's a pretty rigid lifestyle for many years with med school and then being in the hospitals and then residency and then you're starting your practice. There's not a lot of room for a lot of other things. It's hard to not resent your career a little bit when it's four in the morning, and in our case, it's minus 40 degrees outside Celsius, and you have to go to the hospital. And you know, it's hard to not question your life choices and think like if I was doing something else, I would be in bed right now. Or if you're like crying in the bathroom because someone just called you uh something unpleasant and it was your attending as a resident. And so I think going into writing, the reason I mention all that is going into writing for me, I love it so much. And it feels like it connects a part of me that feels so like such an early part of me and such a tender part and such a such an honest part that I don't want it to ever become tainted with resentment or tainted with anger or like feeling tortured. And so often when I sit down and write, I feel gratitude and I feel centeredness, and I so badly don't want some of the feelings of that kind of anger, resentment, or what have you, that are in medicine or have been in medicine for me to filter into the writing process because I've already done that. You know, like I've done the whole going down a career path and questioning yourself and questioning, am I good enough? And questioning, do I need to be doing this and should I be doing this and what's it all mean? And writing as much as I can. I want it to stay just as as pure as it can, even though it's not pure, if that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense.
SPEAKER_01:And my gosh, what a beautiful way to approach it. I love that you are so aware of what it is for you and what you'd like it to be and continue to be. I think you're on the right track. After reading your book, I definitely think you're on the right track. Okay, let's talk about your title.
SPEAKER_00:Did you come up with it? Partly. Okay. We were working with a different title, and I had written, I can't remember, the first few chapters, and there was a phrase that I kept using over and over again. And my agent flagged it and said, What about this as a title? Like you use it more than once, and it was children like us. Because I don't think actually the phrase children like us pops up in the book at all. But when I was writing the first draft, I used it not infrequently. So it was pretty early when we swapped that title because it just felt a lot more fitting and a lot more apt. When George, who's in the book, he's my cousin, he's a pretty prominent character in the book, if you want to call it that. He's the only one to have read multiple drafts. And when he had read the final one, he had sent me a really touching email. And in one part of it, he had said, you know, kids like us, and then said something. He's like, I didn't realize I actually just said your title right there.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Like, what a perfect title. Because I think so many of us grew up with a bit of that. Well, this just happens to kids like us. This is just the the world for children like us. This is just our lot in life when we're children like us.
SPEAKER_01:And it's a really powerful title. It conveys innocence. It sets the reader up for a collective story. Yes, it's your memoir and your personal experience, but it's bigger than that too. There is this collective that feels on the outside of something, separated out. And you so eloquently tell us about that divide while also telling us about the personal ways that you struggle to feel like you belonged. It's also a beautiful cover. The fireflies, the colors. Were you able to have any input in your cover design? I'm not sure that authors typically do.
SPEAKER_00:I don't think they do. My team was so great. I actually at one point had just said, I just see fireflies on the cover. There's again that scene with me and George hunting fireflies. And I had mentioned that to my editor, I think, just saying that's what I picture the book. And she had come back to me and said, that actually just opened something up for our artist. And that's when she came up with that beautiful cover.
SPEAKER_01:So it's beautiful. And this idea of hunting fireflies as a child, like it was such an innocent moment in a life where there was a lot of fear and there was a lot of loneliness. It just it like encapsulates so many feelings very quickly and very powerfully. So good on you and your team.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the artist, her name's Talia Abramson, and she's a Canadian graphic designer, I believe. Very cool.
SPEAKER_01:Another cool thing in your memoir, you include a one-page word on hope. You write, with each flip of the page, will you remain open, open to hope? And if not quite open to it, perhaps open to the possibility of it. Hope for us all to hold the capacity for difficult stories, our own and others. Why was that important for you to do?
SPEAKER_00:When it comes to stories of adoption, at least in my world, there have been so many arguments of which way is more nature versus nurture. And there are so many preconceived biases. I think it's in America too, but I can really just speak to Canada. When it comes to, oh, an Indigenous person is sharing their story. Some people, not indigenous people, non-Indigenous people, will brace themselves and say, oh no, they're going to say this or they're gonna blame us or they're gonna, you know, there's a lot of that. On the flip side, for Indigenous people, sharing stories like this can be really triggering and really re-traumatizing, depending on how the story is shared, because it does bring up so much for so many of us. And so this idea of hope to me was a bridge between the two. Like if we can all just kind of hold on to a little bit of hope that maybe this story can open our hearts in a different way. And maybe if we release our fears a little bit or just put them to the side while we open this book and hold on to hope that if we stay with the feelings or with the words on the page a bit, it can show us something about ourselves or about our own lives or or about others that we maybe wouldn't be able to access if if we didn't hold on to a bit of hope that this could happen.
SPEAKER_01:It seems like it's your hope that your readers simply remain open to the information that they're getting in your memoir. Put the defensiveness away and hear what you have to say without resistance. And you offer us such a unique story: an indigenous woman adopted into a white Mennonite family, and how the repercussions of that and your country, the world's actions towards indigenous populations have played out and how you view yourself and the world. This is your truth, and you're just asking your readers to hear it. Yeah. Okay, so let's get into your memoir. All right, Britney. I have never read a memoir where the author actually describes photographs and home videos in such detail and with such feeling, like I could see it. I I was watching it there. Are these actual photographs and home videos, or was this like an artistic choice?
SPEAKER_00:They are like even the details of the clothes I might have been wearing or the way my my Jita, my grandpa was sitting, or um, the songs that we sung. Oh, rewind. Okay, that's what we said. Yep, that's word for word. Yeah. What inspired you to include that? Was that part of the early drafts? It was not part of the first draft. And the first draft actually I completely scrapped. How did that feel though? Oh my gosh. It felt necessary. That's what it felt like.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Sometimes you just gotta get the first one out of you and then you know what it is.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. When I had gone to that residency uh in the summer of 2023, that's when I scrapped it and just rewrote from the beginning. Well before I even decided to write the book, I had been looking through photo albums quite a bit, processing a lot of memories. And because if I'm honest, memories until the age of about 10 are difficult for me to. I'll remember them in snapshots or in like little flashes of moments. But there are certain memories that are either abundantly vivid or very blank. And so I was actually turning to photos and diaries and some VHS tapes to kind of supplement my own memory to be like, I think I remember this. Does that line up? Because the other thing with processing trauma and processing really difficult emotions from such a young age, they don't necessarily solidify themselves in this sort of narrative flow. They they more kind of, depending on when they happened, they they store in our bodies. And so sometimes I would have like this body memory or this flash of something, and it would feel a little confusing and I didn't know how to make sense of it. And so then I would turn to, and this was just my own personal work trying to make sense of, okay, why do I feel this way? Or why is this certain time of year really difficult for me? Why does my body react when someone says something like this or what have you? I started going through photos and photos and photos and videos just to make sense of it myself. And then I started writing the book and I sort of abandoned all of that, not thinking that the two would ever meet. When I scrapped the first draft, that's when I was like, I think there might be a place for incorporating these memories because writing this book in the way that I want to now, which has a bit of lyricism and poetry and symbolism and kind of like a song in the dark of the night, the the photos and memories and videos felt like that was a big part of that. And so I got a VCR. I just started watching these scenes from home videos or pictures and then just writing about them. That's probably how I got myself into writing again after feeling a little disheartened uh about the thought of throwing out, because throwing out an entire like 100,000 word manuscript. Uh it feels, even though necessary, it feels a little a little disheartening. Yeah. Yeah. And so it felt easier to be like, well, I can just watch something and write about it. Also feel connected to those parts of myself. And that was like a gentle wading into the water again.
SPEAKER_01:Pictures, home videos, they are their own vantage point. They are objective in a way. And I've had the same experience when I've gone back and watched things. You pick up on things that you didn't pick up on when you were a child. I can see how that would just open a bunch of doors to you, uh, shine a little bit of light on some of those moments to help you process and help you tell your story in the very strong way that you ultimately were able to. So even though it was heartbreaking to throw away that first manuscript, oh my god, a hundred thousand words, I can't even imagine. It was all worth it in the end. Don't you hate that phrase? Sometimes you're just like, no, I don't, I don't want it to be worth it in the end. I want it to be worth it right now.
SPEAKER_00:I think that phrase is very comforting when you're at the end.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:When you're in the middle, it's kind of like, yeah, you can just save that.
SPEAKER_01:You're like, when do I know what the end is?
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:In your subtitle, you have the words walking herself home. And that's really how you end your story. I was glad, by the way, to hear that you and Andrew got back together in your acknowledgements. I was like, this lady didn't tell us this in the in the main meet. I know it feels like we're jumping to the end, but I promise this is this is I I love talking about this at the beginning, and we will get into everything that happens in the middle. But this idea of walking yourself home, why did you come to find that home actually meant to you? And why was that visual image of you walking home? Why was that the important way for you to end this?
SPEAKER_00:There are a few reasons. One, Andrew and I separate for a period of time. That was an extraordinarily difficult time for me. And that was also when I was writing the bulk of the book. And actually, interestingly, when I rewrote the entire book was when we had gotten back together. It probably unlocked or engaged some part of me that that was just maybe a little heartbroken. And by a little I mean massively, when I was writing the first draft. But when we were separated, the only thing that seemed to help anything, because for me at least, separations, divorces, breakups, they are they can be insanely painful. And for me, some of the worst of it was all of the um the reactivation of previous losses. And so it was like re-experiencing the loss of all of my foster siblings and anyone important to me. And so it felt very much like this, this feels very apt to me, but it felt like an opening of a whore crux. And the only thing I could do was just let it let it be. And the only thing that seemed to help me in those days was getting up every day. Like I would go to work and I would come home, but the only thing that seemed to help was physically getting outside, putting on runners, and putting one foot in front of the other. And it didn't matter how slow I went, because some days it felt extraordinarily slow. And some days it felt a bit quicker, but I would just walk. And I had my route that I would walk. It didn't matter how long it took me to walk it, but I would just walk it every day. And by the time I got home, 40 minutes later or whatever it was, I would feel a little bit lighter. And it was like this idea of I would leave the house, walk, come back home, and I would return home. And so it was this physical returning of home. Got me into my body a bit more. And so this physical returning of to the home of my body as well. And then I started randomly walking in some hiking paths off of a provincial park. And I just started walking, I think during one of the season changes. And interestingly, it literally is the halfway point between my birth home and my the home where I was raised. Wow. Almost to the minute. Yeah. And I it wasn't planned. I was just driving by there one day and I did a quick turn off and just pulled in. I just got goosebumps.
SPEAKER_02:Oh my gosh. Wow.
SPEAKER_00:And there was just something about walking and seeing the leaves turn and seeing the wildlife change and seeing things become bare around me and physically just walking that felt very physical and very in my body and also very symbolic. And then by the end, this sort of walking myself home, the seasons had changed. There was more life again, which felt very symbolic as well, because there was more life in me at the time. And just speaking to the not mentioning that if Andrew and I got back together in that scene, that was a very intentional choice. I'm still very happy with it because of the epilogue, I think, because I knew that in the epilogue, yeah, people can know by the epilogue that that we're back. But there was the mention of hope at the beginning of the book. And there was um the prologue of starting to walk after the death of my grandmother. And so it was like this pairing of death and hope. And now, in sort of this mirroring and sort of bookmarking, the end of the book, there's life, and there's hope paired with life and this idea of, oh, maybe Britney and Andrew do get back together. And I hope that they do. It felt very kind of mirroring to me and very like a full circle in a way, but not in a very like A B C D sort of way, but in like a feeling sort of way.
SPEAKER_01:And you know what I really appreciated about it? I mean, I I definitely appreciated learning that you guys, when when you were like, Andrew, I'm writing this in our house. I was like, yes. But that wasn't what made you okay. No. You made yourself okay. Yeah. And that's what it was all about from the beginning.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And finding this sense of home that for me at least was not so much a physical place and it wasn't so much a group of people and it wasn't so much a culture, but it was this collection of memories and experiences, painful and joyous and difficult and easy, that all kind of have made me who I am. And just kind of because that's that's all of us, right? Like whether we want to acknowledge the difficult or not, it still has shaped who we are, and whether we would be willing to re-experience some of these things or not, they still have had their impact on us. And that's what home feels like to me, kind of this sort of letting it all be, and letting it all kind of be there and understanding the ways in which it has led to this moment and impacted how I see the world and how I interact with the world and how I love others, and also the ways in which I I don't want to interact with the world and and everything, right? And that that feels very much like home to me right now. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Just embracing the light and the dark. Yeah, yeah, and just allowing it all. When you sit with all the parts of yourself and your experiences, you get down to the core of who you are. Earlier you mentioned that tug between nature versus nurture, and your memoir takes us through the questions of identity. Who am I? Where did I come from? Where do I belong? And how they affect our self-worth and our perceived value. In your memoir, you write that when you're born, you're carried out of the hospital by a social worker. Quote, I am a child without a culture, a history, a family. All of these things, the government says, can simply be written anew. Brittany, what have you come to discover about identity, how it's shaped, and what can't be erased?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's such a big question, isn't it? For me at least, there are certain parts of who I am that were impossible to erase. And it's it's very reassuring to actually realize that. And I mean from like personality stuff to actual physical stuff that has actually meant more to me than I realized it would, because I have spent my life trying to convince myself that the physical aspects of who we are don't matter. Partly because you grew up in the 90s and 2000s and you get really toxic messages of what it means to be a female.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah. Also, while female empowerment was happening, it was very confusing.
SPEAKER_00:Very, very. And so being a teenager during that time was very difficult. Not that it's not difficult now. I think then my response was kind of like, well, none of this, like none of it should really matter. And you should just focus on it less. And and also being Mennonite, it's very, or growing up Mennonite, it's very like you put the physical aside, the physical does not matter. And then it ranges depending on how conservative of the Mennonite upbringing you have, whether you wear earrings or makeup or put your hair in a bun and a kerchief or what have you. And so I think I spent a lot of time thinking, how I look doesn't really hold a lot. And then I saw a photo. So I saw photos of my birth mother when we met. So I was in my early 20s, and then saw her in person, and that meant something to me. But there was, it meant a lot to me because I saw my mannerisms in her and my cheekbones and my smile and so much. But what meant more to me was I don't know why I never asked for this, but again, when I was going through that period of wanting a lot of photos and and looking through them and trying to process, I had reached out to her and asked for any flat family photos she had. And so she started sending me photos of my grandma and my great grandma and a few of my great great grandmother. It did something to me to see photos of my grandmother and my great grandmother. I can see myself so clearly in their facial features and in their smiles and in the way that they themselves. And there was something about this thread through time where it was like, look at my mother and my grandmother and my great grandmother. And I undeniably come from them. And that did something for my sense of identity. Because looking in mirrors has always been difficult for me. It always held more questions than answers, other than maybe looking and being like, oh, my eyebrows look not too bad today. Okay. Because again, the 90s had their impact on overfucking those bad boys too. Other than that, mirrors have have been very difficult for me. And seeing photos of them and even being able to show people and having them go, oh my goodness, like your grandmother, that is you. And in some ways, I could see myself more in my grandmother than my mother. And there was something about a river, which again is in the book later, of a river having no start and no end, at least at that very specific moment. And just feeling like this was here before I got here and it was here after I got here. And that feels very similar to my family line. And so identity, this is a very long-winded answer, and I apologize. I love it. But there is something I think that can be appropriately weighed when it comes to our physical characteristics that feel linked to our identity that I really appreciate.
SPEAKER_01:It's a connection, a reminder that we're part of something bigger than ourselves. Okay, this seems like a good time to explain what a Mennonite is for our listeners if they're not familiar.
SPEAKER_00:So Mennonites are a cultural group. It ranges from a very conservative sect, where the best way to describe it, even, is Miriam Taves had written a book, Women Talking, that was made into a movie. And Miriam Taves is actually from like we grew up in the same hometown. The women in that film, that is very similar to my father's family. You can be Mennonite and grow up in a colony, which I didn't grow up in a colony, but they don't use rubber on their tires and they don't have TVs in the house. And my dad, for instance, didn't have a TV in the house growing up. It can range from that conservative to pretty liberal, where everything's in the house and there's not really a lot of restrictions. But it's essentially a cultural group with their own traditions and own language and own practices where there is a high emphasis put on the Bible, put on men being kind of the head of the house and home, and kind of this pyramid where it's men, women, and children in my book. I think pretty early on, Fospas and Afternoon Lunch. That's a very Mennonite tradition. Oftentimes the men would eat first and get their plates and then the children and the women at the end, even though the women were the ones who prepared it. But that was just kind of how it how it went. Um and it is, I think many people think of Amish as the nearest. Yeah. And there are many correlations, but then some very distinct differences. But I think some of the similarities are fair to compare.
SPEAKER_01:And your mother's family was Catholic. And the way that you describe the two families in your memoir, it's with a lot of love, but you have very different experiences at your grandparents' homes.
SPEAKER_00:Especially with my because my um my Baba, my maternal grandmother, I would say she raised me at least halftime from a pretty early age. And she was very different from my dad's family, and she had no shame about it. And so that was a very, it was an interesting, very difference in worlds between them.
SPEAKER_01:I loved reading about her, by the way. And as a reader, I'm really glad that you had her in your life because as we've already mentioned, your childhood was peppered with loss, trauma, fear, and confusion. And there's a dark history in your country that you educate us on. Can you tell us more about the 60s scoop?
SPEAKER_00:I think it's hard to talk about the 60s scoop without kind of talking a little bit about what came before it. The biggest thing was residential schools that started, which was where indigenous children were taken, brought to schools, often a long distance away from their home communities. There's a there's a quote that says the purpose of residential schools is to kill the Indian and save the man or save the child. And that's actually coined by an American, by the founder of the first Indian boarding school, R. H. Platt, but that was the foundation of residential schools. And so oftentimes, if families protested, they would be threatened with being arrested, and sometimes they were. Oftentimes they were coerced and told that circumstances were different than they actually were, where they'd be sending their children. And so children would get to the schools, they would immediately be given either Christian names or numbers. And so their names were erased, their identities were erased, their heads were shaved, or or um uh hair was cut into like a bowl cut if you were a little girl, and you would be essentially hosed down with bleach because you were, you know, considered dirty and whatnot. And we know that infections and diseases ran rampant throughout these schools because of the conditions, and children were beaten and punished if they let a word from their own language slip out. And essentially it was just trying to literally whitewash them and it created a massive divide between children and their families, children and their cultures and their communities. And by the 1950s, 1960s, this like society at large started realizing the harms that this was doing, at least on a small scale. And so residential schools started fading out, even though the last one persisted until 1996 uh in Canada. Wow.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Which a lot of people don't know. The government was like, oh, now we have families that don't know how to function as families anymore. You know, go figure. And so essentially the same mindset and the same process of wanting to just erase the Indian and the child continued, but through the social welfare system. And so you had children being taken from homes. Oftentimes, social workers would go into communities and see that they didn't have traditional Western diets in their cupboards. Um, and so that was enough to say, oh, they're not caring for their children properly. Or in indigenous communities, often community is very prominent in raising our children. And so you'll have aunties and grandmothers and cousins very present in our upbringing. And that also was a reason to perhaps remove a child from their home. The term 60 scoop came from one of the workers, I believe, telling a judge that we used to go into communities and literally scoop up the babies. There was a program called Adopt Indian and Metis in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Manitoba is my home province. And there were actual literal ads for children saying, so-and-so is a very good boy and needs a home. And would you want to open your home to little da-da-da-da-da? And there'd be a picture and literally an ad. And that's the legacy of the 60s scoop. And what I didn't realize, and what many people still don't realize, is that it technically continued until 1991. By then, there were still apprehensions, but by then you also had women being coerced to giving up their children or giving up care of their children. My grandmother lost her child immediately after giving birth in a maternity home. I just know that she believed in her heart that she was not right to be my mother, which is part of that legacy. And so even though there weren't these sort of violent apprehensions, you still had this kind of generational pattern and belief of, well, it is very clear to us that we can't raise our own children. So maybe my child might have a better off, a life that's better off if I just relinquish them rather than fight.
SPEAKER_01:It's the rippling effect of oppression. Shows you the danger of what happens when a government goes in and tries to dictate how people can raise their own families and their own people. And I did get really emotional when I read that part in your book because I have two children. And I can't imagine because of what I believe, what I choose to practice, the color of my skin, someone coming in and deeming me unfit to be a mother. And we see it play out time and time again in our world history. And it's frustrating. You have a child now. How how has all of this been for you processing? I can't even imagine.
SPEAKER_00:When I found out that we were having a daughter, which was pretty early on, I had a really rough couple of nights because it hit me in a different way of thinking, I'm gonna have this little girl. And the thought of bringing her into this world and and not holding her. And when you have a newborn, you kind of you just inspect all of them thinking everything is just so miraculous, right? And it was, I think, the very first time in my entire life where I was crying at the thought of some of the things that have happened to me. Because I've never cried about any of it.
SPEAKER_02:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, because it it just was always my normal, this idea of not having a mother hold me for the first several weeks of my life or look at me and think that I'm a little marvel. And the thought of having my daughter in that same scenario still can make me quite emotional. Um, and so I think it's broken me open in a way that's really necessary. Um, because I I just never considered that very sad for myself in the past because I I it was just so normal, you know, so many of my cousins that had happened to as well. And um, that was just that was just my beginning, plain and simple. And so I think pregnancy and motherhood is in a very beautiful way repositioning some things for me. And it's an ongoing path that I'm navigating, I think.
SPEAKER_01:I think your daughter is just so lucky to have you because you're aware of the generational trauma. You've done the work, and it seems like you'll continue doing the work to process the dramatic events that you've experienced, including sexual assault at your church and those losses that you mentioned earlier. I really admire the way that you faced your own pain so that your daughter doesn't have to carry it. You're giving her such a healthy foundation by doing that healing yourself. Thank you. Throughout your memoir, you share with us all the ways that you felt like an outsider, even within your own family. And it felt like you were looking for answers and not necessarily finding them where you potentially thought or hoped you would. But when I was reading your memoir, something really seemed to shift after you were working at the summer camp and you met this family.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Oh my goodness, where do I start? Um so the family itself, they are well, they're less in numbers now, um, because a few have passed away tragically. But it was a family full of girls and one little boy. And the the boy known him since he was two years old. You know, it's funny because they interestingly, and I didn't know this when I first met them, they are biracial as well. They're part South American. And I don't know if that was this underlying current that connected us as well. I'm not sure. But I just connected with them and with their mom, and they embraced me sort of in a really undramatic fashion. And the little boy I mentioned at one point, the older he got, he asked his mom if I literally was his biological half-sister. Because the other thing, too, that I I really gained from connecting with them and then their community was the whole idea of half this and half that was not really a thing. And so I remember someone telling me um they had many siblings on both sides. So through their father and through their mother. And they had just said, like, no, they're all my siblings. I don't consider myself having any half siblings. They're just all my siblings. And it's a very common thing in our various cultures to have, well, so-and-so is my cousin. Well, they're technically my uncle, but I they're more like my cousin, or they're my brother, but they're not technically my brother. They're actually my uncle, but they grew up, you know, like they're so much like my uncle cousin or my auntie grandma or whatever. The the lines are just a lot more blurred and no one struggles with it.
SPEAKER_01:It's not about how they're related to you bloodwise, it's who they are to your soul and how they help affect that part of you, the most important part of you.
SPEAKER_00:I think that also helped me realize that there were threads of that within my Mennonite family, not the Mennonite part, but the indigenous of us. Because George, for instance, when I describe him, I say, Well, he's my cousin, but he's the closest thing to a brother I have. So he's like my cousin brother. And so connecting with this family in this community just felt like a homecoming for me in ways that although I I have a Nishinaabe, um, they're in a Nishinaabe community, and I have a Nishinaabe heritage. And so there's there's overlap in that way, but I'm Metis and they're not Metis. And so there's there's differences, and yet there is really common ground that connected us that really helped, I think, probably at the end of the day, just normalize parts of who I was that didn't quite fit with being Mennonite that I couldn't figure out until I met them and was like, oh, that's just that that's that's just me. Okay, got it.
SPEAKER_01:And it seems like you found something with them, this found family that for whatever reason you weren't able to find when you did reconnect with your birth family.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I think the more the older I'm getting and the more I'm becoming a mother, or the more, you know, with every day it's a new yeah, right? Especially this, the more compassion and love I have for her position and for her. And also we all come from our own families with our own levels of dysfunction and trauma. And it takes a lifetime and then some to try and unpack it and navigate it. And when you're in survival mode, you you don't really have the privilege of doing that. No. I will say though, that my some of my aunties, so my my grandmother's sisters who are still around, I have really great connections with some of them. One really beautiful thing that happened at my grandmother's funeral service. One of her sisters just took me and just kind of walked me around, introducing me to all of these different relatives. I don't know if she really asked my permission as much as she just kind of and it and it the the not asking my permission felt very family-like. So I really appreciated it and I felt very included because she was just like, oh, this is so-and-so, so-and-so's daughter. This is Brittany, da-da-da. This is B's granddaughter. Like, I don't know if it's just part of her culture, like those in our language at least, there's not a word for the aunties, like the sisters of your grandmother. It's just all grandmother.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, okay. That's cool.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It's either nocum or cookum. And so they're all just kind of at that level. And I think that's common among many indigenous languages, but I would have to double check that. And so they're all kind of just grandmotherly. Actually, at my book launch event a couple like a month or two ago, I was talking and I was in the middle of saying something, and then I looked over and saw that my one, another auntie, was just in the front row with her granddaughter, just sitting there. And then she bought like as many books as she has grandchildren because she wanted to give it all to them. And so, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:What a supportive way for her to show her love for you and a validation of your story and your experience. Before I let you go, I would just love to talk about your finding medicine. It feels like you are such a gift to the indigenous women who come in to the hospital. It seemed like you were able to see people in a way that they maybe would not have been seen had they just had, you know, white doctors. You had to deal with some difficult racist moments.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, thank you for saying that. I definitely did not feel that. I think because I felt essentially torn between two positions, like straddling one side and then the other, and feeling like on the side of medicine, we were in this position where we were just failing this woman. And yet I had to kind of stay in line with, well, medically, what do we da-da-da-da-da? But then also wanting to advocate for this person in front of me because I intimately related with her. There were circumstances where afterwards some woman would thank me and I would just be confused, like, what are you thanking me for? Because I don't feel like I did enough for you. Because I just essentially I believed you, and then I relayed that information to someone higher up.
SPEAKER_01:But you believed her. Like that's it means so much. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:You know, I just remember this one woman who had also been part of the 60s scoop, and I just sat there holding her hand. And that was the most I could offer her. And that was perhaps more than anyone had offered her in that environment. And again, it still felt like not enough, but it was all that I could give in terms of our system is what it is. And I was a medical student and I have no control over anything at that point. And even as a physician, like an attending now, I have no control, but I have a bit more of a voice that I know how to use at least. But yeah, it was just kind of being present. And I think this is the other thing that I am learning, holds a lot of weight is being aware of my own pain and my own difficult experiences and carrying that with me and allowing that to inform how I show up in those moments with people, um, especially Indigenous women and indigenous children. Because sometimes if I think of myself when I was younger and I think of, oh, what would I say to myself or what would I tell myself? What would I do? And I think I would just sit there and rub my back. And so I would just sit there and hold my hand because that tells me I'm less alone than any words could.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Thank you for offering that. I think sometimes it is difficult. We don't know necessarily how to show up for other people because we don't know how to show up for ourselves.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And you have to learn how to do that. And we all carry these, these inherent biases. And it's important for us to acknowledge them, the dark parts of ourselves, what we've been conditioned to believe about the world, about ourselves. Because when we shine light on that and we make room for compassion and love and family and forgiveness and grace, that's how we can create a better world for everyone.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I find too, for a while there, before I had started really unpacking my own experiences, there was a lot of self-judgment that was really protective because that allowed me to, if I judged myself and if I told myself that that this assault was my fault or that I was unwanted and that was my fault because I was just too unwantable. If everything was just my fault, then first of all, then I could fix it moving forward. Also, I could just judge myself until the cows came home and that would, you know. But then I found when I was really judgmental towards myself, that would really translate to judging other people in similar circumstances. I think we've all had experiences where we maybe don't hear the words of judgment from doctors, although many of us do. But even when we don't actually hear the actual words of judgment, we can still feel it. And I think it was a pretty eye-opening transition for me when I started having more compassion for myself and sitting with my own pain and realizing, like, you were just a little girl and this wasn't your fault. Oh, how painful. And oh, how I wish I could have just held you during that moment. And so I'm gonna hold you now. That did something for me in terms of allowing myself to hold that space for others in front of me. And that probably made one of the biggest impacts for me as a physician, which feels felt so backwards for me because it was like, no, I just need to understand their experiences and their physical conditions from an intellectual level and just like really understand it. I don't have to make any of this about me. And of course, acknowledging your own pain and your own experiences isn't making it about you. It's allowing yourself to be fully human while encountering another fully human being.
SPEAKER_01:What I'm hearing is that you've made the conscious decision to remember that everyone you meet at work and just in life is a complex person with the dark and the light. But if we can't accept that about ourselves, it makes it difficult to accept that about others. Yeah. I I love that you brought up sitting with yourself. Did you learn that in therapy? Like what did that actually look like? Because I loved reading that part of the book and I thought, ooh, we should all do that, but ooh, I don't know if I can, you know.
SPEAKER_00:I didn't learn it so much as like a step-by-step process in therapy, as much as it felt like a natural byproduct of what we were doing with my clinical psychologist. And it was a matter of me not being able to sleep at night. It was this intuitive process of at night, what felt the most comforting and the most comforting in that moment felt like sitting with myself and kind of just allowing that. I don't know if it's imagination or if it's um just the most intuitive core part of who I was. And sometimes it was that same six-year-old for weeks on end. And then what would happen is after a period of time, this part of myself just felt ready. I'm ready. I'm gonna get up and let's let's leave this place. And then it would settle for a bit, and then it would be this new part of me that that would come up. And and when I was writing, sometimes I would have to check in with a good example. Is when I was 11 and we got into a car accident, when I was writing about it, it actually presented some more difficult body symptoms than I expected. You and your mother were hit by a drunk driver. And I was hospitalized for a week. She was hospitalized for five weeks. And there was a lot of kind of post-traumatic symptoms that I had for probably months on end that I very quickly learned to self-soothe because I had didn't have anyone. And when I was writing it, I realized in order to actually write in a way that felt vivid and tangible, I had to kind of check in with that part of myself and and talk to her and be like, we're not gonna write about anything that makes you uncomfortable today. We're just gonna sit here. And then if it got too difficult, we'd be like, hey, we're gonna call it quits and we're gonna do it tomorrow and just revisit it. And and that was actually a very useful, I don't know if you want to call it a skill or a learned approach.
SPEAKER_01:You write. I spend every night with the younger versions of myself, four and six years old, eight years old, eleven years old, thirteen and fourteen and twenty years old. I spend as much time with each of them as they need, and each one needs something different from me. Your memoir does so many things. It educates, it entertains, it's hopeful, it's painful. And it also, for me, really drove home this idea that metamorphosis can only happen when we do the work like this on ourselves and for ourselves. As we wrap up this episode, what is the biggest takeaway that you hope our readers leave your story with?
SPEAKER_00:I think I have two. One is just goes back to that the idea of when we can find that self-compassion and sit with ourselves and acknowledge our own pain, which is so terrifying. Just how powerful that can be, not only for ourselves, but then for our immediate family and then our extended family and our friends, and then just our jobs too. I think it can never be understated how powerful that is. My second one, and I don't know why I feel like I should say this, but for anyone who's listening and feels like they want to write, right? Whether it gets published or not, whether anyone else reads it or not, there's just something about writing and having your words in front of you that can just be so healing and so moving. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I echo that. Your story, your voice matters. And like you said, even if it's just for you, that matters. Maybe that's the way that you extend compassion to yourself. And if you have to throw away your first 100,000 words, we apologize, but clearly it might be part of your process. So, you know. All right, Brittany, my last question how do you remain hopeful?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, that's a good question. The thing that keeps coming to me right now is through the relationships in my life, looking at my daughter and just like just looking at the different parts of her right now is giving me so much hope. Just in everything, you know, like it's this new life. And and then just seeing Andrew as he navigates this time as well. And it wasn't that long ago where we did not know whether we'd ever have this together, whether we'd have this on a personal level. And I just remember being so hopeless then. And one of my best friends who's also in the book, her name's Shanna. It was her and then my clinical psychologist who were kind of like, you know what, it might be too painful for you to hope right now, but we'll have hope for you. And they did, you know.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. Be the hope for someone else.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. When it's too scary, you know, for someone in your life to hold hope, then we can hope on their behalf. And so I think it's through relationships right now that just kind of give me hope to be a bit braver and hope to grant myself a bit more compassion and in this period of life rest too. And not easily, but I'm learning the importance of rest too. But yeah, I think it's through the the people in my life that I'm learning to trust. And with trust comes maybe hope, I think.
SPEAKER_01:Beautiful. I love that wisdom. I look forward to reading whatever you write next, whether it's on a paper napkin or in a book form. I'm going to link in the show notes how to buy Britney's book because I want you all to check it out. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I absolutely loved our discussion. I adored meeting you. I adored reading your story. Thank you. Thank you. This was lovely. Thank you. And thank you all so much for listening. If you'd like to further support the show, review and rate the show. That helps other people find us. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to listen to extended versions of the book club discussions. You can find all that information and more at babesinbookland.com. Next week, my friend Jamie is here to chat about Gina Rosario's Horse Barbie, a memoir of reclamation. It's a dazzling testimony from an icon who sits at the center of transgender history and activism. Horse Barbie is a celebratory and universal story of survival, love, and pure joy. Until then, have a great week. We'll see you soon.
