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Are you ready to tap in to your power within so that your business can reach its truest potential? Hi, I’m Candice Hozza, and I help business entrepreneurs access their inner GPS so that their business can grow and thrive. You are here to serve and to create an impact in this world. Welcome to the Intuitive Business Podcast.
Hello, everyone, and welcome. As I sit here in my office, I am hearing a truck outside. The truck’s a dump truck and it’s dumping about three scoops of mulch, just in time for Mother’s Day. I want to dedicate this episode, of course, to all mothers and especially to my mother-in-law, Josie. Today, she was diagnosed with a coronavirus and she’s been my mom for 36 years. I’m just sending her really happy thoughts, and I’m inviting you to send happy thoughts of health and wealth to her. She’s asymptomatic right now, but she had a headache this week, we think, so yeah.
So send her some love. She’s really awesome lady. She has a picture with her and Mother Teresa, and that pretty much sums it up with my mother-in-law. She’s always devoted her life to feeding the homeless and helping kids in school that needed it. She was a librarian. She would always read stories and take care of them. So I’m going to devote this or dedicate this episode to her and wishing her good health and happiness, that she comes through this quickly. So thank you.
So today I want to talk about mothers. Oh my goodness, what a subject. For me and for the model of the world I came from, I was very lucky and very loved, and I’m really grateful for that. So that’s the pre-frame I’m going to come from is moms that truly love their children, and for some mothers out there that may have had to go some other … the child that they gave up in this world because of the situation that they were in. As you’re listening to this, you may have not even ever shared with somebody that you had to give a baby up, but I want to talk to you, too, because I want to thank you.
I want to thank you from an adopted kid. I want to talk to you because somehow I understand your heart. My very first episode, I talk about meeting my birth mother. I knew my birth mother. I met her when I was 33 years old. I knew nothing about her. Zero. Not her name, not how old she was nor where she lived. Nothing. So one time I wrote a story called Bananas on Trees. I was a 16-year-old girl, and I went to Florida for my very first time, and my girlfriend’s Nana, we were at her house, and I looked up in the tree, and I’ll be darned, there were these green things shaped just like bananas. I wasn’t stupid, I knew what they were, but it just absolutely mesmerized me that these bananas were up on that tree.
Somehow in my heart, since I never was born from anybody … as a little kid, our minds are quite literal, and I didn’t have a birth vessel. My mom didn’t bore me or birthed me into this world. She loved me and I’d loved her and she was my mom, but she didn’t bring me into the world that way. So I kind of felt like bananas on trees. Even though we know the banana in the grocery store literally came from a tree, the first time you see it, even if you’re 16, it’s kind of jarring. That’s kind of how it felt when I met my birth mother. I tell the story about how intuition led me and intuitive reading led me to my mother, and all parts of that reading were true. I still have that recorded today.
So the person that’s listening to me right now that may have given a child up, and maybe you don’t know who your kid is, or how they’re doing, if they’re safe. So I’m going to invite you to think about the gift that my birth mother gave to me. She gave me my mom, Betty. She gave me a better life than she could have had then when she was 17 or 18. She gave me a mom and dad that I can’t even imagine. I mean, I love my children so much, but somehow as much as I love my children, I really felt loved from top to bottom, front to back, oh man. So if you’re sitting there for any reason wondering how your daughter or your son’s doing that you may have given up, I can tell you, I met a whole bunch of adopted kids. I had a great life, so I can only speak for me, but I saw a lot of adopted kids back in my day. The kids that were given up in the ’60s, they were all so loved, and well taken care of, and so wanted, and had such great families, at the picnics I used to go to with the adopted kids. We were all adopted.
Then, every now and then, there’d be somebody show up with the adopted party that had an adopted kid, and they’d have a bump in their belly. So surprise, surprise. That’s kind of how my mom was too. My mom, Betty, she’s the one that raised me and she’s the one I consider my mom. Jerry was my birth mom and I consider her Jerry, my birth mom, but I called her Jerry. I always called my mom, mom.
So this month, a couple of days ago, I just celebrated my I Got You Day. That always started to be a sad day after both my parents were gone. My mom’s now been gone around 25 years. So May 2nd, I’d always get a gift because that was my birthday. That was the first day my parents saw me and they had an I Got You story. So my mom said she waited and waited and waited for me. They waited 10 years. They were married 10 years. I forget how long. I think it was close to that for the adoption agency because my mom and dad were like 31 and 32. Back in the ’60s, people had their grandchildren by the time they were 36. So they waited to get me a long time. Then my mom was quite anxious and they would make all these visits into the home.
It got to the point that she was going to have a breakdown over it, my dad said, because they’d come in and they’d come in with a white glove. He never knew when they were coming, and the woman would say, “How’s the child ever going to live in this home? It’s so clean. Every time I come in, there’s never any dust.” Like, “How’s the child going to live like that?” Then my mom would just about go crazy, like sitting there waiting and waiting for somebody to like pop into the home while she didn’t dust, which, of course, drove her crazy. So, finally, my dad said to the social worker, “You know, Mrs. Bucca,” he said, “I don’t think Bets can handle much more of this, and we really want a child more than anything in this world. But I can’t see my wife go through this anymore.” Mrs. Bucca said, “Billy, I want to tell you something.” Oops … “Be patient. Just wait a little bit longer.” What she didn’t tell him is that I was already born and I was in the orphanage, and the other thing that she didn’t tell him until I believe the day that she was dying, my dad went to see her.
I remember when he came home, I think it was about 15, and he was shooken up. Like he was … my dad was a real big heart, but he wasn’t like a crier, but I could see he was trying to keep himself together that whole day when he came home and … God, I’m getting emotional thinking about him being emotional. All these years later, I finally realized that when he went to say goodbye to her, I think she told him who she was. Let me tell you who she was. She was an aunt of mine. So my biological birth father was involved in the picture in the beginning, and then my mom and him fell apart at the end. So they had intentions to get married, so the families were involved in this adoption, and at least knew about the situation.
So this lady, Mrs. Bucca, who’s many years deceased, she was a social worker and she was placing her flesh and blood, me, with my mom and dad. I can’t imagine how emotional my dad must have felt knowing that this woman entrusted one of her family members to him. He was a man of great honor and a great pride, and he did everything in life to the nth degree. You know how some people say, “Oh, I procrastinate”? I can honestly say both of my parents were not procrastinators. If something needed to be done, it was done then. When they called me, they expected me to come then. It wasn’t like, “Well, wait a second, mom. Wait a second, dad.” Mm-mm (negative), not in our house. They were great parents.
So this Mother’s Day, all these years later, understanding that when I was born I was in the orphanage and that I was coming home to my mom and dad, and they almost stopped the process right then. Thank goodness that my dad listened to Mrs. Bucca and hang in there for a little bit longer, because right after then they got a call within about two weeks after my mom and dad said, “We can’t handle this anymore. It’s just too disruptive.” Mrs. Bucca said, “We have a couple options for you. One is there’s a little boy and a little girl,” I forget, they were older, maybe four and two, “that need adopted and then we have a baby.” Mrs. Bucca knew what my mom and dad wanted. They said, of course, “Oh, the baby,” and they didn’t even ask what sex. I don’t really think they asked what sex it was right away. Then they were like, “Oh, what is it?” and they said, “A little girl,” and my dad always loved little girls and when they had little Carly, oh my God, he was so happy.
So they went to get me. My mom immediately quit work. She went into work. She said, “Hey, I got my baby coming. I am giving my two-week notice,” and then they quickly had a baby shower almost immediately at work. Then she was a mom. After all those years working, she became a mom. So they drove up to … I believe they went to Roselia. I don’t think that they ever told me or alluded to it not being Roselia, and that’s where they adopted me or picked me up. What I didn’t know my whole life is that Roselia was a home for unwed mothers in Pittsburgh, and young girls would go there to have children that they were going to give up for adoption right before they were showing. Then what would happen is they would help care for the babies with the sisters of Roselia. It was a certain part of the nuns, and I can’t think of it right now. The Dominican nuns and Sisters of Seton Hill, which, if you’ve heard my Phoenix story of my son’s birth, that’s where I went to pray to be healed from cancer. The same nuns. I don’t know if I put that together except right now. So the nuns that nurtured me when I was a baby up until three months old in the orphanage in Roselia are the same nuns I ironically went to, to pray for my son to be born when I was sick with cancer and wanted a second child, Phoenix, my son.
So they go there, and they get out of the car, and they parked the car, and they have a box. There’s like a Kaufmann’s box. Kaufmann’s was a department store, like Watt & Shand or … So they had this box, and my mom says I had to have everything in there. I had to have diaper, diaper pins, plastic pants, shoes, socks. They would have picked me up in May, so like a sweater, a bonnet, a blanket. Like there was … I came with nothing, which is really how all kids come. So they came, they brought this little box in, and the sisters greeted them. They sat them in a waiting room and they took the box and they went back.
My mom said the longest wait of her life. Her nine months was 10 years of having the lady with the finger duster, with the white gloves, coming to her house, and that time that she sat in that waiting room was torturous. She says, “I don’t know what they were doing,” but if you knew my mom, my socks had ruffles. My plastic panties had ruffles. Ruffles had ruffles. I probably had a ruffled slip, so this poor nuns probably had to put all this stuff on me. So she said, “I was waiting and waiting,” and she said, “Then they called me and I came back,” and she said, “Oh, I met you for the first time.”
She said, “You were so beautiful,” and this sister was like putting me, the baby, towards my mom and she said, “Oh Betty, if you don’t stop crying, you’re not going to get the baby.” My dad said she took the back of her hands and start like wiping every tear off of her face so that her eyes were completely dry and like a half of a second, because somehow she took the sisters seriously that this baby wouldn’t be given to her. She was crying. I’m crying now. I never saw my birth like this by telling it to somebody else. I always heard this story as a little girl for my I Got You Day.
So then they took me home and my dad said, the first thing, they got back in the car and he had gotten a parking ticket. He said, “Dammit, Candice Ann, you cost me money ever since.” My husband still says to this day that my dad gave him a dowry to take me. So they took me home and they stopped to get something, some milk or formula or something that was probably on a list. I sat in the car with my mom in her arms. That’s how you carried your baby home in the front seat, unseatbelted in your arms. Although we did seatbelt, I do remember my dad likes seatbelts.
So he went in and he got the grocery bag. My mom said, “I remember when he came out, he had this ball,” and she said, like, he was such a little kid. Like, he went into the grocery store, he was so excited. He’s going to play ball with his three-month old daughter. She said, “It seemed like such a big ball,” and she said, later, she looked at it and it really cupped in her hand. It wasn’t a big ball at all. So that was my gotcha story. That’s how I was born. Dat-da-dah-dah.
So that was on May 2nd. That’s my I Got You Day. I have to admit, these last 25 years, I felt really kind of sad because my sister, she was not born naturally and I absolutely adore her. I remember every part of her birth story. That wasn’t a special day to her. We really didn’t celebrate it as a family. It was usually done privately, my mom, and you’ll get a gift or just say Happy I Got You. So sorry, I had a tickle. So my sister, we’re 10 years apart. I never talked to her about my I Got You Day because we’re sisters. I mean, I don’t think of her as anything different than my sister and I don’t think she ever thinks of me like that.
So this year, I was on this quest, this challenge, and the challenge that the prompter of the quest gave us was a couple options, like to give $100 to somebody; or to read a book, a special book; or to give something meaningful away. All of a sudden, what that led me to was this. I decided to make my I Got You Day a special day again, because it was feeling bad and it shouldn’t have felt bad. I just felt sad. I just miss my parents. I missed that somebody knew that they got me. What a big baby I am right now, but that’s okay. We all have a little girl’s heart, don’t we? I like to think that I do. My little girl was sad. She was sad. She didn’t have her special mom and her special dad, and she wanted to celebrate. She wanted to celebrate her parents.
So what I did was, as I thought, what has meaning that you’re holding onto that your children are going to inherit? But it’s probably won’t mean anything to them unless maybe you give it to them now and place the meaning on it. So I decided that from this day moving forward, I would make my I Got You Day, May 2nd, special by giving my children something special. So this year, what I gave my son was my father’s pocket knife that’s been sitting in the bottom of my jewelries drawer for 30 years. My dad carried that always when I was a little girl. It was in his pocket. When I was a teenager, it was in his pocket. The day he died, it was in his pocket. It was his pocket knife. It was a really pretty, too. I liked it. So I gave that to my son who never met his grandfather. So I thought, “Now I have that part of my I Got You Day back.” Then for my daughter, I said, because of the quarantine, I said, “When you come, I have a little box of jewelry and that’s Bubba’s,” which is her grandmother’s, “and I want you to pick out a piece that’s meaningful to you and to have that in memory of my I Got You Day because I had such great parents.” So that’s how we celebrate May 2nd this year.
So that brings me to my two mothers. So I’m so, so, so grateful that the woman that might be listening right now is hearing a story about a little girl that was really loved, and although you might not know the little girl that you gave birth to, and that you had to make a decision that supported your life and that baby, that baby that you needed to place into somebody else’s arms, just like that nun placed me in my mom’s arms, just like that dad that took care of me and bought me a little ball and cussed at me for costing him so much money. He was playing, of course. My dad was super playful. That little girl that had a daddy that was super playful. You, my love, gave me all that. Your decisions, the decision of a different type of love.
So there’s a special poem that I want to share today. As I met my birth mother when I was 33 years old, my mother who raised me for 33 years, she didn’t want to do this at first. She had the information about my birth mother and I actually … she and I talked about it, and when we first talked about it, she said, “Well, when I pass, you can have it.” That was in July, and then in January my mother ended up giving me some information that helped with the location of my mother. Actually, it’s what led me to my mother.
So the one thing I’ve never really talked about is I was going through so much when I was meeting my birth mother, just meeting her and talking to her and asking, “Why was I put up for adoption?” All the things that you wonder about your genetics, like all the important things that girls want to know. When did you get your period? What size shoes were you? When did you go through menopause? When did you …? All the things I could never ask I was always putting unknown on all my medical records.
So you, my love, that I’m talking to today, I’m sharing happy stories. My mother, who gave me this gift of letting me meet my mother, the one thing I didn’t think about during the … Oh, it was actually traumatic. Just emotionally, it’s too much emotion, too much bottled emotion released all at the same time. So I was going through my own stuff, so I couldn’t support my mom. I know that she has really great sisters and she had my sister so I know she had great support. But one day, then my birth mother passed away almost immediately within 13 days and so I was struggling emotionally. Eventually, after I went to the funeral, to my birth mother’s funeral, I just wanted to go back and just be in my mom’s arms literally. I was 33 years old. I went back, and she was working on a restaurant. She was a hostess and she loved this work so much, greeting people and seeing people every day. She was able to nurture them and carry their food back to them, if they were elderly and just so many nice things.
One day a woman came in, one of her friends, in the restaurant she worked at and they said, “Betty, we know you’ve been probably going through a lot with you helping Candy to find her birth mother and her meeting her, and then of course her losing her birth mother and you supporting your daughter through all that. I’m sure that this has been hard on you and we just wanted to give you this gift.” It was a poem. It’s called Legacy of an Adopted Child.
Once there were two women who never knew each other. One, you do not remember; the other, you call mother. Two different lives shaped to make yours one. One became your guiding star; the other became your sun. The first gave you life, the second taught you to live it. The first gave you a need for love, and the second was there to give it. One gave you a nationality, and the other gave you a name. One gave you the seed of talent, and the other gave you an aim. One gave you emotions, and the other one calmed your fears. One saw your first smile, and the other one dried your tears. One gave you up … One gave you up, it was all she could do. The other prayed for a child and was led straight to you. And now you ask me through your tears the age-old question through the years, heredity or environment, which are you a product of? Neither my darling, neither. Just two kinds of love.
I wish you all the happiest, as I’m crying, Mother’s Day ever from a mother’s heart to all the mother’s hearts. I’m sending you so much love on this mother’s day. If you would like my meditation on love to offer to your mom for Mother’s Day, please go to my website, www.candicehozza.com/love, and share that with your mom virtually, right? Happy Mother’s Day. Much love. Bye.