On June 7, 2026, I joined Pat O’Brien and Chester Jackson on After the Kids Move In, the AFFCNY radio program on WGBB 1240 AM / 95.9 FM, Long Island. We talk about infertility and the grief that has no rites, how I came to adoption, what openness asks of a family year after year, and the books that grew out of all of it. Listen to the original audio on SoundCloud.
The views expressed in the following program do not necessarily represent those of the staff, management, or owners of WGBB.
Pat O’Brien: Hello, hello, hello there, and welcome to this week’s live broadcast of After the Kids Move In here on this wonderful Sunday evening. After the Kids Move In is a program brought to you every Sunday right here on WGBB Radio — 1240 on your AM dial, or 95.9 on your FM dial — from 6:37 p.m. Eastern Time. WGBB truly is the radio station that serves our Long Island community.
This broadcast is brought to you by the Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York — hereafter referred to as the Coalition — and one of the Coalition’s signature programs, the Long Island Adoption and Guardianship Assistance Program for Everyone, hereafter referred to as Long Island AGAPE.
I’m your co-host, Pat O’Brien, along with this week’s and every other week’s co-host, Chester Jackson. And our guest this week is the insightful and knowledgeable adoptive parent, Lakshmi Iyer. Can you say hi to our audience, Lakshmi?
Lakshmi Iyer: Oh — hi!
Pat O’Brien: Good. I’ll get right back to you after I finish reading this introduction, because I just want the folks who are driving around, listening in for the first time tonight, to know what we’re all about. And Chester, you’re there too, right?
Chester Jackson: I am here as well.
Pat O’Brien: All right, good. So, After the Kids Move In is first and foremost a conversation — a conversation for all the Long Island adoptive and relative kinship-care families, and now even Brooklyn and Queens families, within the sound of our voices, who might be experiencing certain stresses, tensions, and perhaps other challenges raising children who may have experienced early-life trauma and loss, and who’d like to know more about how to alleviate some of those stresses for a more peaceful existence at home.
Whether you’re raising a child as an adoptive, foster, kinship, or guardianship parent, most of the children you’re raising share that one commonality of having experienced various levels of early-life trauma and loss. This broadcast helps parents and families understand why raising children who have experienced trauma and loss requires parenting strategies different from, one, the strategies we might have used raising our own birth and biological children; and two, the strategies the parents who raised us used with us when we were children — our children’s ages.
Over the course of this program, we have many conversations with four types of experts in our field. The first are the healing professionals — therapists, counselors, and other adoptive, foster, and kinship professionals who serve our families each and every day. The second are the caregiving parents — the adoptive, foster, kinship, and guardianship parents, like Chester, Lakshmi, and myself. The third are adults and young adults who have lived the experience, as persons who were either adopted — like our co-host Chester Jackson — or who experienced part of their childhood in the foster-care system. And finally, the members of the impacted original families from which the children who were adopted or in foster care originated.
Also, if you’re listening to our broadcast and have any interest in attending our Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption / Wendy’s Wonderful Kids “Get to Know You” post-placement and adoption orientation: that meeting happens virtually on the first Tuesday of every month at 7 p.m. You can contact me, Pat O’Brien, directly at 718-570-5134, or email me at pat@affcny.org if you’d like to learn more. And if you happen to know any families formed through the Wendy’s Wonderful Kids program, please ask them to contact us too, so we can share the additional supports we offer families created through this signature program of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. Again, that’s Pat O’Brien, 718-570-5134, or pat@affcny.org.
And finally, if you’re a family on Long Island — and now we’ve been working in Queens too — who has adopted a child, or has custody of, or informally taken in, a relative child, and you have questions about parenting a child who may have experienced early-life trauma and loss: please finish listening to this broadcast and give us a call on Monday morning at 631-598-1983. Or, if you need to talk to someone right away, you can call us right after this broadcast at 1-888-80-HELPLINE. That’s our 24-hour helpline: 888-804-3575, or 1-888-80-HELPLINE.
So — our guest this evening is Lakshmi Iyer, a writer and author, an adoptive mom who has thought carefully about what openness in adoption actually asks of a family. She came to adoption on her own terms, and she’s spent the years since making sense of it in public: in essays, in children’s books that take children’s questions seriously, and in a memoir about adoption and what it means to be kin. Her books include the children’s middle-grade novel Why Is My Hair Curly? and the essay collection The Smudged Hyphen. But today we’re going to talk less about the writing and more about the living — how Lakshmi became a parent, and how she chose to raise her children with honesty about where they come from.
Lakshmi writes and speaks about openness in adoption not as policy or a checklist, but as a practice — something you return to year after year, even when the answers aren’t available yet. She’s direct about the difficulty, and she doesn’t smooth it over. Whether you’re an adoptive parent, considering becoming one, or someone in the adoption community yourself, I think you’ll find this conversation worth your time. Lakshmi, welcome. I really appreciate that you’re with us.
Lakshmi Iyer: Thanks for having me.
Pat O’Brien: I wanted to start at the beginning. How did you come to adopt your children? What was your process, and how long did it take you to decide?
Lakshmi Iyer: So, I got married in 2001, and I seriously wanted to become a mom — for about two, three years. I thought it would be easy. It turned out it wasn’t. So I went through the whole infertility treadmill: all sorts of treatment — injectables, that kind of stuff — and also acupuncture, Ayurveda. You name it, I tried it. That lasted all the way from 2003 to about 2008, at which point I decided I was done with any kind of medical intervention. I was spent — mentally, physically — and I’d realized that this was not how I wanted to live my life.
But that didn’t mean I’d gotten back to quote-unquote “normal” living. I took about two years to grieve the loss of a dream, because in my head, through the entire infertility process, I’d had visions of what my baby shower would look like, what my future child would look like. Even though it was only in my head, it felt real. There’s this line somewhere in Harry Potter, where Dumbledore says, “Just because it’s in your head, Harry, doesn’t mean it’s not real.” I think about that all the time.
So I grieved the loss as I would grieve a death. And it’s sad that in none of our cultures is there a process for this phantom grief — there are no rites, no memorials, no way of marking what you’ve lost. I did that for about two years. And then, for the first time, I thought about adoption. I didn’t think about surrogacy — that was another thing. I come from India, and there’s a lot of talk about surrogacy there, but somehow I didn’t feel it was an ethical thing for me to do. Not that at that point I was thinking about adoption in terms of ethics either — that came later. But I first started thinking about adoption around June of 2009.
As a writer, I’m constantly processing everything through my writing. I blogged — I had a public-facing blog, and a private blog where I was processing my infertility journey. As part of that, when I first mentioned adoption in one of those baby-related communities, there was a birth mother — I think she went by Claud at that point — who was talking about adoption in a way I hadn’t heard from other hopeful adoptive parents, who had nothing but good things to say about it. So I started following Claud, and one thing led to another, and I was deep down the rabbit hole that is adoption blogs.
By this time — I’d started in June — I was reading, gathering all this information, but I was also pushing through the desperation of somebody who really, really wanted to be a mom. So in that process, in March 2009, we wrote a check for $5,000 or $6,000, with no accounting, no transparency. And eventually, in January of 2010, we adopted our children. They came to us as toddlers — they were ten months old when they came. That’s pretty much the initial arc.
Chester Jackson: That’s gorgeous. One of the things I wanted to ask about is the grieving process. For some folks that’s not a conscious thing — some folks fight it — and you talked about how our society doesn’t leave a lot of room for that kind of grief. Your process was that you did it through a blog. What told you that you had to do that first?
Lakshmi Iyer: I don’t think anything told me — it’s just the way I live my life. I process complex emotions through my writing. When I first moved here — I moved to the U.S. at age 25 — I literally uprooted myself from everything I’d known. In the beginning, all my writing was about being an immigrant, about assimilating into a new society, making new friends. And I was also a new bride in an arranged marriage — I practically came here with a stranger, so I wrote about that. Everything that needed processing for me, words were the medium. So I came by it naturally, but in hindsight, that was my therapy.
Chester Jackson: Yes. Keep moving forward — you’re at 2009, the adoption, the girls came in 2010. What happened next?
Lakshmi Iyer: So in 2010 we brought the girls home. But even before that — in January of 2010, the social worker reached out and said, “Are you still thinking about adopting?” Because at that point, I’d already gone through a previous adoption — a third one that fell through. The mother changed her mind, and they said, “It’s for the child’s good.” So while I grieved, it wasn’t because I’d lost that child — it was that I’d lost a chance to become a mom. I don’t know if that difference comes through, but in any case, I grieved it, and I felt like I was done with it.
The social worker who’d been involved in that failed adoption reached out and said, “There’s a situation with my agency — we have to present at least three profiles, and only two profiles wanted to take on twins and toddlers.” So we ended up presenting a profile, and we got picked, and the children came home.
At that point I was so deep into adoption blogs, and into processing the adoption scene, that — I’d brought a child home, I was happy about becoming a mother, but there was also this strange grief and guilt whenever I looked at the children. I’d look at them and think about their mother. She went by Brandy at that point — now she goes by Kat — but Kat was all I could think about. Given that I blogged so much, I set up a private blog for her, and I’d write constantly — every day. I’d say things like, “Oh, the children ate this much.” Literally, I died for details. And every time we had a doctor’s visit, I’d record the head circumference — every detail the doctor told me, I’d share with her. She didn’t get to read those until much later. But I kept documenting and documenting, because I felt so guilty, and I didn’t want her to feel like she was missing out on her children.
Chester Jackson: Let’s talk about that, because you’ve described your own adoption as a very open adoption. Did you do that out of guilt, or were there other reasons you wanted a truly open adoption?
Lakshmi Iyer: I have to credit adoptee voices — the loudest voices are the ones screaming in pain. I could hear them, and I felt that if I didn’t, my child twenty years from now would feel I hadn’t done everything in my capacity to keep them connected with their birth family and birth heritage. Granted, doing everything in my capacity doesn’t mean it’ll meet every one of their needs. I’m sure that five years from now, whenever they choose to use their voices, they’ll find things I could have done differently, could have done better — and I’ll be open to that. The way I think about it is: I’m doing the best I can, and I’m hoping that’s enough.
Chester Jackson: Could you just repeat that quote for me — “the loudest voices”?
Lakshmi Iyer: The loudest voices in the room are usually the ones that are screaming in pain. You don’t talk loudly about something unless it affects you deeply. As long as everything is going well in your life, you’re not going to be talking about it online.
And this is something — there was a screening of a documentary, with Angela Tucker, at my children’s school, and in the Q&A afterward, one adopted person in the room said, “My experience is different, which is why I don’t talk about it.” That hit me hard. I’d never thought about it that way. I’d always viewed the adopted person’s voice as one monolith, and that had me reflecting — that’s one of the voices we don’t get to hear: the ones for whom it didn’t eat them up.
Chester Jackson: Can you tell us some of the unique aspects of your open adoption?
Lakshmi Iyer: Yeah. It has to do with the fact that we live 3,000 miles from each other, so physical visits are few and far between. We’ve literally visited Kat twice; Kat has visited us once. We’ve spent, maybe, a total of three weeks together in person. But in our house, Kat — and by extension her brother, her grandparents, and on the children’s father’s side, their father, their grandparents, their aunt — they’re all kind of phantom figures in the house. We have gifts from the family everywhere. We have pictures on the walls. Conversation about them is the way I’d talk about my sister, or my niece, or my cousins and their children. They’re an invisible presence in our house, and that, in my mind, is what openness is about.
Yes, the letters and the visits are incredibly important. But what’s more important is how you speak about and keep that family alive in your house — in conversation, in things like Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, whatever it is. The way we mark events in our house, they’re part of it, whether they’re physically present or not. Does that make sense?
Chester Jackson: Yes, it makes a lot of sense. And it’s sometimes very hard to translate that to parents who have this fear — these feelings of regret, these fears that somehow they’re going to lose the child. Speak a little about that. You did an Instagram post, which I think is outstanding, where you talk about the open hand. Could you talk a little about that?
Lakshmi Iyer: Oh, yeah. It has to do with how I felt about the guilt, initially. I kept thinking: I have these children for, say, eighteen years. These eighteen years are mine. I have physical, legal, emotional responsibility for these beings in my care — and that extends to both the child born to me and the child I brought in. But responsibility aside, they’re growing into their own people. And honestly, as teenagers, they probably share maybe ten, fifteen percent of their everyday life with me and with their dad. We don’t have any visibility into the eight-plus hours outside the house — their social-media presence, who they’re talking to.
As much as I want to keep tabs on everything and make sure I have a say in everything, I realize it’s a futile process. All I can do is tell them what worries me, tell them the best way to approach certain things, and then trust that they’ve understood it — and trust that they know we are a safe base they can come back to in case something goes wrong. It’s not easy. I’m not saying it’s easy at all. I’m just saying that over the years my parenting philosophy has evolved — from smothering, to holding them so lightly that I’m willing and ready to let go, and hope that they come back of their own accord.
Pat O’Brien: I was just going to point out — regular listeners to this program might know Lakshmi’s story, because a documentary was done on her family called Love Chaos Kin. I want people to look that up, because you can find it: Love Chaos Kin. And you’d mentioned that was two years ago, and now you’re in a different place. You are very different now than you were two years ago, and you expect you’ll be different two years from now. I was wondering what that difference is — where have you grown?
Lakshmi Iyer: It’s a simple thing. In my twenties and thirties, I honestly thought of sexuality as a choice. I’m not proud of it. It’s just that I was a product of my circumstances. I’ve done my reading, I’ve done my research, before arriving at my opinion. The Lakshmi of 2005 is not the Lakshmi of 2015, who is not the Lakshmi of 2025 — and that’s true because as new information is presented to me, I go and learn things.
Even my approach to parenting — I felt like I was in control. And then somewhere in the past few years, I realized I have zero control over anything. So I can either choose to stew on it, or I can learn to let go. At every point, it’s just that: you can choose to hold on to things that serve you no longer, or you can learn to evolve, adapt, and grow. Based on what I’ve learned over the past twenty years, I just feel the next twenty are going to look very different. I will not be the person I am today.
Even when I watch the documentary now, as an onlooker, I feel the person there is just the subject of the documentary — she’s no longer me. And not in a bad way. That overwhelmed, exhausted mother no longer exists. I actually enjoy parenting teens — despite what popular culture would have you believe.
Chester Jackson: One of the amazing things about you is that you record so much of your thoughts, your feelings, your growth, in your writing — so folks have a lot of access to you through your books. Could you give us some of your book titles, and anything you’re working on now?
Lakshmi Iyer: Absolutely. In 2020 I wrote a middle-grade novel called Why Is My Hair Curly? It was a commissioned work by a publishing house in India, so the target audience is India. I wrote it from the point of view of a child who was adopted. Looking back, this is an example of where I feel I’ve changed — the 2020 Lakshmi didn’t think about what it was to co-opt an adopted person’s voice. Now I know better. But when I was writing that book, my friend’s daughter, who was adopted from India, was my sounding board. I shared my manuscript with her and got her feedback. She was the same age as my kids — the age group I was writing for. So that’s one.
Then I wrote a book called Hindsight, which is really about trauma. It’s about a woman who survives a sexual assault — but the book isn’t about the assault. It’s about how the same incident impacts all the people in the story: the person who was assaulted, her husband, the friends who witnessed it, and society. That ripple effect. I wanted to process trauma through that book.
Then I wrote a book called A Star Keeps Its Distance. In the last couple of years I’ve been totally into K-pop and all things Korean, so this book is about a K-pop idol and a journalist who covers the band the idol is in. They fall in love. That book is my ode to the fandom.
Then there’s a collection of essays called The Smudged Hyphen — basically a collection of my writing over the years. It traces my evolution as a writer and as a person.
And currently I’m working on the memoir, which I’ve tentatively titled The Color of Kin. It’s a book that’s like a complement to the documentary — but it’s the inside life, the things you don’t see on screen.
Then I’m working on a book called The Naturalized, about a woman in her fifties taking a train ride through America. She’s an immigrant. She finds herself on that journey, and so she’s naturalized in every sense. And I have another children’s book called Why Is My Skin Brown?, which should be coming out in July — I’m in the process of getting it out. It’s by the same publisher as Why Is My Hair Curly?
Pat O’Brien: Why is your memoir called The Color of Kin? What’s the thinking behind that?
Lakshmi Iyer: Because the color of kin means multiple things. Obviously, we’re a very visibly transracial family. The way I relate to the child born to me and the way I relate to the children I adopted — it’s different. I’ve written about that, too. And I feel there’s this gradient of color — quote-unquote “color” — in relationship. So it’s a play on words.
Pat O’Brien: Gotcha. I want folks to know that if they’d like to learn anything about your new books, and to get your books, they can go straight to your website. The website, spelled out on air: [lgiyer.com.] Can people go to that website and find a way to order the books?
Lakshmi Iyer: Yes, absolutely.
Pat O’Brien: One of the things I want you to know is that I’m doing a lot of talking about you in various places, so I expect your readership is going to grow. I know folks can reach you on Instagram — and you have a Facebook presence as well?
Lakshmi Iyer: Oh, yes. I’m everywhere, pretty much. I’m on Facebook.
Pat O’Brien: And what’s your social-media handle, so people can find you?
Lakshmi Iyer: [Spelled out on air: @lakshgiri, on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Threads, and X.]
Pat O’Brien: I strongly recommend folks reach out to you and read more of your work. I look forward to it — I’m a big fan.
Lakshmi Iyer: Thank you so much. And thank you for having me on.
Pat O’Brien: Thank you so much for spending this time with us. I’m going to end this broadcast the way I end most of them — with certain sayings for parents to consider.
The first: We parent our children by the power of our example, and not by the example of our power.
Also: Speak to your children as if they are the kindest, wisest, most beautiful, most magical humans on earth — for what they believe is what they will become.
My final thought isn’t a thought at all — it’s a prayer. It’s the child of early-life trauma and loss prayer: May you love me the most when I seem to deserve it the least — because that’s when I need it the most.
So I’ll leave it there, and remind you to give us a call on Monday morning at 631-598-1983, or call our helpline at any other time at 1-888-80-HELPLINE — that’s 888-804-3575. Our website is AFFCNY.org. And always remember never to forget: a child whose behavior pushes you away is a child who needs your connection, your curiosity, your compassion, and your calmness more than anything else.
Good night, Chester. Good night, Lakshmi. Good night, everybody.
Lakshmi Iyer: Good night.
Chester Jackson: Good night.
The views expressed in the previous program do not necessarily represent those of the staff, management, or owners of WGBB.
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