Welcome to Your New Family (or An Adopted Kid Finds His Real Family)

The headline is right. I have a new family and it is a total mind fuck. It is my biological family. The gene pool I have come from.

Some background to begin with:

I found out I was adopted when I was an adult. My adopted parents were mum on the details and such. My adopted family was a mess due to an incident about seven months before they adopted me which tore apart the family. Into this mess, was my bouncing self.

As the years went on, nothing was said. My adopted mom fell further and further into her mental illness and passed away 32 years ago this month. Pretty much taking her secrets with her.

My adopted father left when I was about three and we semi-reconnected when I was 26. Our relationship was on the superficial. I don’t he was capable of a deeper relationship at that time. I know I wasn’t ready or mature enough at that time in my life for a relationship with him. He passed away when I turned 30. Taking whatever secrets he had with him to the grave.

I had two adopted brothers. They were basically adults when I was born and left home when I was still a baby. One of them Mike, I have seen only a couple of times in my life. He is still alive and I haven’t talked to him in about four years. Before that we went 11 years without talking.

The other brother was Dave. Our relationship was strange. He was in and out of my life and then in my late 30’s we started to have a good relationship for about four years and then we had a huge blowout. Partly my fault, even though I tried to make amends we never talked the last eight years of his life.

So basically any knowledge of my adoption from my adopted family has been lost to history.

As time went on I made a couple half-hearted attempts to find my birth family. Not really putting much effort into it. As I got older, I put less and less into it.

I had a good friend who was really trying to help me. She made some in-roads, but I threw up some road blocks.

A large part of me was that I was afraid. I was really afraid that I would be rejected by them. I felt really rejected by my adopted family growing up. I felt really alone and like the lone wolf. It is something that I carry with me to this day.

But even though, I said I didn’t give a rat’s ass. I really did deep down inside.

Enter my daughter. My beautiful daughter made it her mission to find my biological family. She made it into a Master’s Degree project. She spent a lot of time on it and a lot of resources on it.

It took three years, but in April of 2023 she finally was able to (after an Ancestry.com test that I let sit for months) track down my biological family.

She track down one of my cousins who was close to my biological mom. Sadly, we found out that my biological mom passed away six weeks earlier.

Bummer.

I got to talk to a cousin and she told me about my biological mother and it was totally weird to me. I found out that I was the only child she ever had.

They had a family reunion in June 2023, naturally I didn’t go. Too scared too. My daughter went and I was the talk of the reunion.

Over the last 14 months or so, I have met and connected with an aunt, met more cousins and starting to feel more comfortable about this whole deal.

It is a major change in my life as I have never thought about extended family before as I never had to deal with it. I have really just lived in my own little bubble and went about my merry little way, not worrying about family issues. Now it is different.

It is a new wrinkle in my life and a huge change. It has taken a while to embrace, but I am starting to embrace it more.