I feel like the other half of my identity is just around the next corner. I’m approaching the one year mark since I started the search for my biological father using DNA testing. It’s been an eventful and exciting journey, and even if I learned nothing else from today on, I’ve gotten more information than I’ve had my entire life. My mother never hid from me that my father I knew and grew up with wasn’t my biological father. I don’t really recall any big, earth shattering conversations about it- I just remember knowing. I’m thankful for that. Growing up and seeing daytime TV shows of parents being reunited with adopted children, or missing siblings, or other lost family members always made me feel jealous, and a little sad. I had wished I could write in to Jenny Jones but I knew that without a name they wouldn’t be able to do anything for me. I would watch the psychic Sylvia Brown on Montel Williams and think that maybe she could find him for me. I bought one of her books when I was in middle school and read it cover to cover, but knew that I was just a kid and I’d never be able to afford her “services”. While I’ve grown up to not believe in those kinds of things, I’ve always wondered what she would have said.
I’ve played it out in my head a million times, what I would say or how it would feel. What would it be like to see him? To see someone that looks like me? When I first got connected with a woman that ended up being my mother’s cousin from her estranged father’s side when I read a line from her email I burst into sobs:
“You have a large family that would love to know you”
The emotion that spilled out of me was beyond my control. It was what I had been waiting to hear for a long time, but ultimately ended up from a side of the family I was already somewhat familiar with. It just made me realize that this search is so important to me. It’s important to me not because the family I’ve known my entire life is in any way lacking, it’s just that I’ve felt like a part of me is missing. I don’t need or want anything more than answers. Thankfully a few of those answers have already come just from the testing but I just want more. Again, I can’t help but feel like I’m just at the edge of a breakthrough.
I finally had an answer to the question I had been asked since I was a teen- what are you?