When I first reunited with my biological family back in 2012, I wrote a story for Catalyst magazine about it. Re-reading it I realize I would write it differently now.
Finding my family at the age of 38 was exciting and bewildering and terrifying and completely overwhelming. I had turned so much of my focus and intention towards this project for the prior three years, with initially very little hope of ever succeeding, that to have things finally just drop into my lap was extremely disorienting. I had never known who I was, really–but when I walked into that hotel lobby and met Catherine, my bio mom, and she hugged me, so much immediately made sense. She has a huge loving heart, a gigantic restless mind, a never-ceasing curiosity about the universe, a crazy case of ADHD, and she’s on the ASD spectrum. Suddenly it was OK for me to be all of those things as well.
The nature/nurture thing was thrown into stark relief, and it just got more intense when I met my bio dad, Joe, that fall. I look just like him. I had never seen anyone who resembled me, and this fact had always gnawed at me. Joe turned out to be adopted as well, and he’d never met anyone who looked like him either. Meeting was a powerful moment for both of us.
Adoption search is crazy. You have to be willing to metabolize anything you might find, and you might find some really awful stuff. At the tame end of the spectrum, you could find a group of people who completely reject you. At the ugly end, things like rape, incest, abuse, suicide, murder…all the worst things that humans are capable of. I was so lucky that although there was a lot of ugly stuff, the people I found universally liked me and were glad I’d turned up.
Shout out to Matt Winkler, the second-cousin-once-removed who made this all possible by sharing his mom’s genealogy with me when I tracked him down after receiving a 23andMe match with him. He’s doing great work in Texas.
For now, here’s a story I wrote a decade ago, which has info about my mom, and another page about my dad. It’s been a weird ride, but I’m so incredibly grateful for it.