My biological father was married before he met my mom. He had a daughter with his first wife and when they divorced in 1972 he signed his rights away. So, I have another sister out there. This time she is older by almost two years, born in May of 1971. I have no reason to believe she has any idea I exist. I doubt she had any contact with our biological father after he signed away his parental rights (I believe my sister was adopted by the man her mother married shortly after her divorce was final in 1972) and I wasn't born until 1973. I've known about her, though not who she is, since I met my mom and heard her story. I've kind of put off looking for her because she is connected to that side of the family, but that isn't her fault any more than it is mine, so I decided it was time.
My wife and I spent a fair amount of this past weekend looking for her and I think we found her. We are waiting for verification, but I'm 99% sure we have the right person. During the course of the search I found a high school yearbook picture of my "father". It is the only picture I have ever seen of him. I don't share a lot of features with him, but there is some resemblance, and it hit me pretty hard, harder than I would have expected. This is after all the man that didn't want me then and doesn't want me now. I would very much like to be able to say that it doesn't bother me but I would be lying.
We as a society use a lot of pretty words and phrases to describe adoption and adopted children. We like to make it sound like something that is positive and a great experience. We say things like "special" and "chosen" and "your parents loved you so much they had to give you away". It sounds good, but its crap. At its heart adoption is about rejection because barring exceptional circumstances like the death of the parents, children are available for adoption because they were rejected by someone, someone didn't want them. We grow up wondering, usually just to ourselves because for most of us talking about the natural parents isn't an option, why we were not good enough to keep. I always believed that the person who didn't want me, the person for whom I just wasn't good enough was my father. I understood how things worked when I was born. If he had wanted me then more than likely he would have married my mother and they would have kept me. That might not have turned out well, and I understood that, but I also understood that is how things were done. Many years later when I learned the real story that turned out to be the case.
When my mom talked to him a couple of months ago to find out if he ever intended to respond to my letter he told her that he didn't regret my being adopted and thought things turned out the way they were supposed to. How very thoughtful of him. I'm so glad that my years of feeling out of place, without a real home, and rejected were the best thing for him. I really hope my sister has had a better experience as a result of him being her "father" than I have. I also hope she doesn't hold our shared parentage against me.
Another sister. I can't ignore that. I don't know how to be anyone's brother though. I really want to do a good job of it, but like almost everything else I do I mostly feel lost. So many things involving family just don't come naturally to me like they do to other people. One of the fantastic results of adoption, never having a real family. I'm lucky to have one now, though I'm not sure how lucky they are to have me, as inept as I am at being a brother and son.
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