In a recent storytime video on her YouTube channel, Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi opened up about her experience of being adopted.
The Jersey Shore star revealed details about her childhood and the curiosities she had growing up in Marlboro, New York. “I don’t really talk about it, just because I just feel like my family is my family,” she said. “I never really thought, ‘What’s my birth mother like? What’s my birth family like?’” explained Snooki, “because I’m so content with my adoptive parents and my adopted life and family. But you know I thought about it once I started getting older, like, ‘What does my mom look like? What does my dad look like?’”
She further explained how she was adopted at six months from Santiago, Chile by Andrew and Helen Polizzi. “I was always meant to be with my adoptive parents, which I don’t even, ew, I hate saying adoptive parents because they are my parents, it’s weird,” she shared. “Even though my nationality is Chilean, I grew up Italian. So when people say to me what’s your nationality I say, ‘I’m Chilean but I grew up Italian.’ I feel like I’m both.”
She continued, “Because I always knew, they didn’t have to tell me. They didn’t have to sit me down at 10 and be like, ‘Nicole, you’re adopted.’ I knew, we don’t look alike. I’m brown, you’re white. This doesn’t make sense but I always knew in my heart that I was adopted and I was totally fine with it.”
“Every time I ask my parents they would get upset. I could just tell they would get upset because they didn’t want to tell me the truth or they didn’t want me to think that they’re not my parents which was never the case. Eventually, when I was 21, 22, I got my dad drunk and was like, ‘Dad, can you just tell me what went on? Why was I up for adoption?’”
“Basically, my birth parents had other siblings and they couldn’t afford me. I can’t even imagine because I have two kids, putting up a child for adoption, to give them a better life,” the mother of two said. “That’s so amazing for them, that shows how much they loved me. But also I could never do that. I can’t even imagine how they felt giving me up but thank you for that.”
Snooki even went on to admit that she would choose to meet her biological parents in the future, if she could. “In the back of my head I’m always curious to meet my birth family,” she said. “I always wonder if I never was adopted and I stayed with my birth parents would I still be a hot mess like this? Just in Spanish, probably. I feel like I was always meant to be this hot mess.”
Watch her tell the full story below.