Michelle Glogovac (00:01.24)
Hi, Zellie. I am so much better now that I get to talk to you. It brings a smile to my face because it's been too long since we've done this.

Zelly Ruskin (00:02.776)
Hi, how are you?

Yeah.

Zelly Ruskin (00:11.267)
It is, we always have a good time and we always get off topic.

Michelle Glogovac (00:14.808)
So be prepared everyone. And I think it's been probably a year since we did our first get together meeting Zoom.

Zelly Ruskin (00:25.286)
It is almost, yeah. It is a year. is. Yeah.

Michelle Glogovac (00:27.286)
Yeah, so yeah, that's what I was thinking. That's awesome. So we're long friends now. Can you introduce everyone to yourself, please, so they can become your friend too?

Zelly Ruskin (00:40.292)
everybody, I'll be friends with anyone. I am Zellie Ruskin. I am the author of Not Yours to Keep. It is an accidental novel. I never intended on becoming an author and I was never studied in writing, but I had this plot idea in my head and I got it out. The road to that was a little bit longer than that sentence, but

That's sort of what happened in the story is about an infertile adoption specialist who dreams of adopting her pregnant client's baby and her husband who is keeping secrets and a woman who is haunted by childhood abuse, who's obsessed with creating a life with the two people that she's lost. And it comes from...

My experience as an adoption consultant many years ago, comes from my experience with fertility issues and it also comes from just a lot of interesting thoughts in my head.

Michelle Glogovac (01:54.946)
don't know what that says.

Zelly Ruskin (01:56.486)
It turns out it's like us quiet ones who have some really complicated thoughts up there.

Michelle Glogovac (02:02.584)
Because it feels very real. The book was amazing. I loved it. There were parts where I was crying. I was scared. I'm like, my gosh, I didn't see other parts coming. It was so good. And I love that you're saying it was accidental because it doesn't feel like it was accidental.

Zelly Ruskin (02:17.19)
Thank

Zelly Ruskin (02:21.039)
Hahaha.

Michelle Glogovac (02:23.52)
What can you take us back to being an adoption specialist? What does that mean? What does that look like? And how much of the book is real based on those experiences?

Zelly Ruskin (02:33.222)
Yeah. So I, my first career was a social worker and I worked, I worked in adoption as an adoption consultant and I was responsible for doing the home studies for couples who were hoping to adopt. I worked with

birth mothers or birth parents who were thinking about placing their child for adoption. And I was working in domestic infant adoption. So I literally went to hospitals with a car seat in my car and picked up babies from the hospital, which was really cool. And...

I also, when there were adoptees or birth parents who came back looking for information, they were my clients too. And it was an amazing job given the mindset that we had then. I wouldn't say the mindset is the same, but we thought we were putting together these great families, these babies that needed a home.

We, you I worked with birth parents to make sure that they knew the laws and they knew their rights and that they made the best possible decision for themselves that they could in the moment. So in that time, it was an amazing job. was very emotional. It was very difficult. nobody was there.

by first choice, I guess is the right way to say it. Everyone had been through some grief or was making some very difficult decision for the most part. But I loved what I did and I loved working with these people and their stories and their emotions lived with me forever. And I always wanted to tell not their direct stories per se, but

Zelly Ruskin (04:55.918)
I felt the need for people to understand adoption in a way that you wouldn't get from the movies or television. I needed people to see who the players were. And if I could get one person to say, wow, I didn't know that about adoption, or I could get one person to feel compassion for someone they'd stereotyped, I sort of felt like, well, then I'd done my job. That was...

Michelle Glogovac (05:22.712)
Hmm.

Zelly Ruskin (05:23.332)
really what I wanted to do. And when I started writing the story, I would say how much of it is real, the policies and procedures and the laws are all real. A lot of the emotions are very consistent with those that my clients went through. The characters are composites of both clients that I had, but also

personal experiences, people that I've met, interactions I've had with family, things that I learned, they all went into these characters. One story that I love to tell, as I was writing this book, I got into a cab, I live in New York City. Get into cabs all the time, we don't pay attention to anything, I'm on my phone, cab driver doesn't know me from boo. Out of nowhere starts talking about his adoption.

He was adopted and he had all these emotions about it. And I'm just like, kind of what is the universe doing to me right now? And I'm listening to his story. He was an older man and he was talking about feelings of not being good enough, being abandoned, not understanding why he was given up a lot of anger, a lot of hurt. And the last thing he said about it was I wish

I'd never been told I was adopted because then all of these questions wouldn't have arisen in him. I, so it's moments like that where I captured his emotions and his thoughts as he expressed them to me and the emotions and feelings that I was left with when I got out of that cab. And that's what I put into my characters.

Michelle Glogovac (06:52.311)
Hmm.

Zelly Ruskin (07:18.02)
those kinds of situations.

Zelly Ruskin (07:24.07)
I'm trying to think what else was real.

Michelle Glogovac (07:27.778)
What do you do with that? mean, this must've been quite the cab ride for him to divulge all of this to you.

Zelly Ruskin (07:34.042)
I think I'm at 10 minutes. Yeah. Right. I literally was, I mean, I think I don't know what I would have done with it had I not been in the middle of writing this book. I don't know if my conversation or my feelings. mean, I really didn't have a chance to say much to him. He was just, this was his spiel. But had I not been writing this book, I, you know,

Michelle Glogovac (07:36.728)
Uh-uh.

Zelly Ruskin (08:02.667)
I don't know, but because I was writing the book, I was just busy absorbing it all because I needed then to go check and see, have I written this properly? Because what he was saying was very consistent with what I'd learned from other adult adoptees that I talked to as I was researching the book and writing the book.

The mindset, as I said before, the perception of adoption today is so different. So whereas we were, you know, we were helping families who wanted a child but didn't yet have one and you know, all that. I don't think we really stopped and thought about the adoptees other than, hey, we're giving you this great family. Now you're going to go have this great life and aren't we wonderful? And they don't really feel like that now.

Michelle Glogovac (08:56.535)
Mm.

Zelly Ruskin (09:00.864)
they, you know, I, there's, I worked, when I worked in adoption, was on the cusp of these designated adoptions where couples would go through attorneys or whatever means and locate a birth parent. And they would go through the lawyer to do the adoption, but they still needed an agency to do the home study and to go through the process and do all the paperwork and all.

So that was new. I was more the waitlist kind of adoption. But in today's world, there's more interaction between birth parents and adoptive families in theory. And there's less secrets in theory, like for what we did. You couldn't know anything. know, once this happened, it was all locked up in a file. And if you came back,

Michelle Glogovac (09:50.904)
Mm.

Zelly Ruskin (09:59.234)
I would probably say to you, I can't tell you anything. And, you know, so today's world in theory, and what I'm understanding is, again, there's not enough education, not enough support and not enough law changes, but in theory, as an adoptive parent, I'm going to work with this birth parent and we're going to have this openness and we're going to have a, you you're going to be a part of our lives. And there's,

nothing to stop that adoptive family from saying we changed our mind.

Michelle Glogovac (10:31.831)
Mm.

Zelly Ruskin (10:33.858)
So, you know, things may have changed since I researched this book and I hope it had, but that's sort of what I was learning in today's world, that, you know, it's still the rights of the adoptees, the rights of the birth parents, the support for all of them, for everybody is not up to speed. So that was really, I mean, it sort of made me want to write another book about adoption, which I might do in the future.

because I had learned so much and the whole setting was so different. But in my world and in this book, it is really more a traditional sort of experience with commercial license for entertainment value.

Michelle Glogovac (11:22.36)
And there's really, you can't keep secrets these days. With all the DNA access that we have, you may have had a secret 20 years ago, but somebody's DNA is out there and they're matching it and the secret will be revealed.

Zelly Ruskin (11:36.268)
Mm-hmm. Which is very cool in a lot of ways and very scary in a lot of ways.

Michelle Glogovac (11:40.568)
I was gonna say it's scary too.

Zelly Ruskin (11:43.174)
Yeah, so I think we all do that. We all like put in our DNA thinking, okay, you what were my parents up to? Am I going to find something?

Michelle Glogovac (11:50.71)
Right? Yeah. There are secret siblings out there and yeah. How did, you decide, okay, I've got this story, I'm going to write it. And then what did that journey look like? Because you said it was a longer one, but I've had guests who say it took me eight years, 20 years. And I'm like, that's long.

Zelly Ruskin (12:09.782)
Yeah. The whole process, I mean, from start to finish is very long. I I began writing about maybe a dozen years ago just for myself. And it wasn't so much that I was ever planning to publish. It was just an outlet that I needed. And I moved to New York City at that time. And I decided I just really need to finish a project. And I submitted it to a workshop.

didn't expect to get into a workshop because like I said, I am as green as it gets as far as writing goes. And I got accepted into this workshop with a group of incredible people who'd all had articles published in journals or they were, you know, somehow worked for newspapers or magazines. And I'm just like, And I worked on that book for about six years and she died a wonderful death.

She, you I don't, don't mourn for her because as exciting as that book was to write, it was a character study for me. It was, it was my education. And as I went through those years, this plot that I had in my head from a while back where I was in an over-expired relationship and the

Michelle Glogovac (13:36.418)
This is great. That's a great little soundbite.

Zelly Ruskin (13:37.254)
So, the reason for that, why I was still in that relationship is like fodder for another book. But in that relationship, I found a photograph and I asked him about this photograph and he just flat out lied to me. And my respect for this human being was not that high. So the lie didn't really affect me in any way, but I did just look at this.

photograph and think there's a really cool plot in there somewhere and it just so as I was learning to write that plot just kept growing and growing and when I I think it was 2018 that I finally started to

I'm ready, I'm going to write this story. And one of my kids challenged me to not write about infidelity. And not that I was like trying to publish, like infidelity sells. like, what am I supposed to write about? we were actually in this, stop me because I can go on too long on this story. We were in San Francisco with myself and my two kids.

Michelle Glogovac (14:38.252)
Mmm.

Michelle Glogovac (14:50.614)
No, I know this story, I like it.

Zelly Ruskin (14:59.318)
And we were in the back of a car on the way to the airport. And I'm like, okay, well, if it's not about infidelity, what is this going to look like? You know, how does this work? And at this point, the driver jumped into the story and kept throwing out, well, it's a veteran who was in Europe during the war. this is it.

And he had the most incredible plot that I could ever write. Cause I know nothing about any of that. And I didn't want to write historical fiction, but it was, so we were like, you know, aside from encouraging him to write the story out of the conversation, I started realizing that my love of adoption had to play into this story. And so the conversation for the rest of the ride became about

What is this photo? Who's in this photo and how does it relate to adoption? And that's when I threw in, you know, all the what ifs. So what if I had known when I was an adoption consultant that I had fertility issues, which was something that I had found out after I left the field. And so what if I had known, would that have affected my relationship with my clients? Would I have

Michelle Glogovac (16:17.719)
Mmm.

Zelly Ruskin (16:24.006)
crossed any lines with them and could I have kept the job? know, it have been so that was one part of it and then it was sort of like, okay, well what if the character's husband has a photo and lies about it and why would he be lying about it and how does that relate to adoption? Okay, so what if it's a picture of a baby and whose baby is it?

And that's how this all started to develop. It was just all of those what ifs. then it just got fun. Like, okay, well, what if, because this is something that happened in working in the field where birth mothers came back searching for their child. And this was sort of on the cusp pre-internet, certainly way before registries. And...

They were birth mothers that had found their children and knew who was raising them and where they lived. And I don't know how they did it, but it made us or made me in retrospect realize how vulnerable we were and how anybody could have gone to the hospital and picked up that baby instead of me and how anybody could have stood outside of our agency.

and watched to see who was taking home a baby and was really happy. And it would have been so easy to find out anything in that way, but we had no protection. We didn't think like that back then. Now everything is secure, hospitals, there's amber alerts, hospitals will shut down if something happens.

but not back then. So all of those things started to really take place and it just became clear that in all of this complication of what I was creating, that I had to tell the story from the three different point of views in order for you to really get to know these characters and empathize with what they were going through.

Michelle Glogovac (18:46.314)
Why do you think that now we are so much more aware and careful and cautious? Is it because we have access to so much more information that nobody realized this before? Because I mean, there's a lot that I think still goes on today that probably went on 20, 30 years ago. But today we're much more not just aware, but cautious and we try to prevent more.

But yet the mindsets haven't really changed. You know, those who would have stocked a family and looked for that are probably still the same people who would do it today. So that part hasn't changed. What changed though to implement so much more?

Zelly Ruskin (19:31.896)
I think that once you have, and this is just my personal opinion, I don't really know, but once you have a bad incident, a very public bad incident, everybody has to rethink their policies and procedures. The laws haven't really changed that much, but I think it's really that that you have to tighten up. have, you know, with the hospitals the same way, like a baby is kidnapped from a hospital. Now all of a sudden there's all these security

pieces put into place. The Amber Alerts came about because of a horrible situation where someone was taken from their home. So I think it's that. think, yes, information is so widely out there that we never had before. And I think that sometimes too much information is a good thing. Sometimes it's not. But I think in this case, you know,

We are, it's the same like, you know, growing up, was, the kids in my neighborhood and I, we were, you know, we'd leave the house, we'd maybe come back for dinner. We could go into anybody's house that we wanted all day long. We were just in and out of each other's, know, doing whatever we want. But if it was dark or someone said, hey, your mother's looking for you, you are home. Nobody questioned the car that was driving down the street and lingering and looking at us.

never would have crossed our minds that we were in danger. But we know so much more now and we might be a little more, I think, you know, might lean a little bit more on the cautious side. But it is, you know, it's all of that. It's the knowledge that might have been an article in a local paper, but now becomes a national or an international story.

Michelle Glogovac (21:25.368)
And then let's talk about a

Zelly Ruskin (21:27.233)
Ahem.

Michelle Glogovac (21:28.554)
international versus domestic because you said you're on the domestic side and I feel like domestic was much bigger than it is now. It seems that people leave the United States to go adopt much more because it's easier.

Zelly Ruskin (21:30.521)
Yeah.

Zelly Ruskin (21:41.509)
Yes.

Mm-hmm. It was. It was until recently. So I worked in the realm of you are on a waiting list. There was never tons of birth mothers that were knocking on our door. It was not like that. So the waiting list was very long. And it would take years before you'd get a call.

And then adoption switched to this, I referred to as designated adoption where birth parents and couples came together. And that's still a thing and it makes it a little bit easier. But again, there's, you you have a field of a huge number of prospective parents who are out there trying to get the attention for one birth mother. It's overwhelming.

So again, that's not something that's gonna happen on a daily basis, but there were all these babies and young children in these countries that for whatever reason, you know, there were orphanages, there were certain genders that were not respected, that they needed homes. And so it became for people who were not,

strictly I want a newborn or strictly it had to be a certain white Caucasian baby. People who were open to other ways of becoming a family turned to international. And it was magnificent in that way. It was a rough process as I understand it from people I know who went that route.

Michelle Glogovac (23:20.44)
Mm-hmm.

Zelly Ruskin (23:39.034)
the amount of time that you had to spend in a different country.

to go through, mean, there was more red tape because it's international. was in you're dealing with a different country that most people didn't even speak the language when they were there. They had to live there for a certain amount of time. from what I understood more often than not, at the end of a very grueling process, they were bringing their children home and these were children that they got to know while they were there. and you sometimes, you know,

There was all different ways. mean, there were certain times that, you know, people be waiting at the airport in the United States and meet their child for the first time. But there is a thing happening now that I am not that articulate on it, but it is headlines. There are certain countries now that have deliberately closed off the adoption route for parents searching for children from America, from the United States.

Michelle Glogovac (24:43.128)
Mm.

Zelly Ruskin (24:44.686)
and it's deliberate and it's grueling. And there are families that have been in the middle of the process who may not be able to bring their children home as a result of all this political international game playing. And it's heartbreaking.

Michelle Glogovac (25:06.21)
Wow.

And now that we're talking about America and politics, your book was written before where we are today and where we're going. And you hit the topics that are so relevant and important. And you did this before you even knew that they were going to be mainstream headline news of mental health, IVF, adoption. All of these things are in your book.

Zelly Ruskin (25:10.746)
Yeah.

Zelly Ruskin (25:16.87)
Okay.

Michelle Glogovac (25:37.186)
brought, you bring attention to them in a beautiful way and it's what's at stake right now.

Zelly Ruskin (25:44.038)
Yeah, it's kind of crazy because the last thing in the world I want to be is political. And the last thing I want my book to be is political. I wrote this book in a Roe v Wade world. And when I was in the publishing track, everything turned on its head and not knowing, you know, in the days leading up to the election, for me,

It was, my God, my book is everything that we're talking about right now, everything that we don't want to go back to. And we're here now and the risk is real now that the things that I am trying to accidentally teach people in my book about adoption and the choices and the freedom to make those choices.

is going to go back to the world that...

Zelly Ruskin (26:52.095)
When I first started in adoption, we had records from the earlier years, not that much before me, but they were earlier years. And like I said, people would come back and look for information. And sometimes we would be able to open those records and you would see and you would hear stories about women who were shamed.

because they were single and pregnant. Women who were...

Zelly Ruskin (27:29.328)
sent away to homes for unwed mothers for which there is a new contemporary name, but it is the same. Where they go and they are made to feel like they have to be isolated from the rest of the world until this baby comes and then your only value is that you have this baby that somebody wants. And there were baby brokers.

which I fear we will see again. There were, you know, I know I've heard again, I want to say I'm not politically articulate, but you know, hearing sound bites of politicians who talk about the need for more babies and this is how we're going to get them. It's terrifying. We live in a world now or we did yesterday where

Teen pregnancy was supported, understood. If a teen chose to keep their child, there was ways for them to do that and do it healthy. I've seen headlines now already where there have been more infant and young child deaths since Roe V. Wade was overturned.

Michelle Glogovac (28:40.375)
Mm-hmm.

Michelle Glogovac (28:56.321)
Mm-hmm.

Zelly Ruskin (28:57.432)
we're going back to a terrible time. And it's as though none of this progress has any effect on it. This certain group that thinks this certain way. And I just, you know, really, hope that as they are turning us backwards, they do find some way to take contemporary knowledge.

and support people better because this is where we came from. There's a reason why we fought not to be back there. So, you know, that's my hope. One can hope.

Michelle Glogovac (29:35.853)
Right.

Michelle Glogovac (29:42.732)
Hope, pray, petition.

I love your book. I loved Not Yours to Keep. It is so good and you have to keep writing. Write some more because yes, everybody needs to read it because it's not just entertaining. You're going to be educated. Your empathy is going to be built. It is all of those things wrapped into one. And to me, that's the best thing that a book could be is not just entertaining, but to encompass so much more.

Zelly Ruskin (29:50.095)
Yeah.

Zelly Ruskin (29:59.014)
Thank you.

Michelle Glogovac (30:15.148)
while also bringing your feelings to the forefront throughout all of this and to really feel what the characters are feeling and to build that empathy, to see, this is what it would be like to be infertile and then be around babies all day long. This is what it would be like to give up a baby and wonder and look at everybody as you see them, is this child mine? It's all of that and so much more. So I can't sing your praises enough.

Zelly Ruskin (30:44.346)
Yeah.

Michelle Glogovac (30:46.114)
Where can everybody find you and buy the bus?

Zelly Ruskin (30:49.872)
So you can go to my website for all information, is ZellieRuskin.com. I make it easy. I'm on all social at Zellie Ruskin. And for up to date and first look at anything that happens, I have a newsletter called Sometimes Narcastic on Substack.

And so you can follow me on that. sometimes when I'm up to date, there are some good giveaways. And so I'm really everywhere. The books are sold everywhere. Books are sold. I have it in paperback Kindle, paperback ebook. And I do have an audio book out now. So that's new news. Yeah, that was a lot of fun.

Michelle Glogovac (31:35.916)
Hey, congratulations.

Zelly Ruskin (31:41.552)
So yeah.

Michelle Glogovac (31:42.946)
Thank you so much. I appreciate you not only as a human being, but for writing this book that we all need to read.

Zelly Ruskin (31:50.928)
Thank you.