without dead time

long overdue post but….

I met my biological family last week.

After years of search and paperwork and praying, it finally happened. And I am thrown for the biggest loop of my life.

The first meeting was so interesting, and happy, and completely natural. After calling through the phone book looking for people who matched the names on my original birth certificate (which I had just received) I found a potential match with no phone number, only an address. My partner and I showed up at the stranger’s house (my dad’s?), left a phone number and lo and behold — he called almost immediately. It was him. We both cried.

It turns out I have a sister, a full sister, who I never knew about at all but was delighted to meet. She is 22, and her name is Carrie. My father’s name is John. My mother, Vickie (Victoria!), has already passed on. She died alone in 1993 from gin, or as some would say, “from the drink”, or (as I rather suspect) from a lifetime of abuse and uncertainty, since it’s rarely a drink alone which does people in without warning.

So a lifelong quest has come to fruition and I don’t quite know what to feel, think, say or do. “Our family comes with a lot of baggage”, Carrie said the other night and while it’s true I was nearly falling off my chair at some of the horror stories from the past, somewhere in my mind I knew they weren’t really any different or more or less despicable than millions of other people’s stories in this world. And that possibly it’s only the suburban upbringing which was always so foreign to me, the one I always found so judgmental and out of touch with reality, making me start and panic as though my adoptive family never had problems of their own.

There’s a touch of the surreal in every interaction now, a bit of confusion about the honest truth and what that is even supposed to mean. It’s intermingled with a fear that I won’t fit in, that it will now be not just one but two families that are legally or technically mine that I can’t relax with or see things eye to eye. And maybe that’s just too much to really expect from a family, and the illusion that I’ve harbored that everyone else has this and I don’t is just that — an illusion.

I am not sure I know what family means. I am not sure I know how to have these relationships and maintain in them the genuine truth that encompasses both compassion and decision. I am not sure what to call dad, if he is dad or if he is John, or what it means to love the strangers who are my genetic kin and have loved me for all this time, wishing happy birthday to “Erika” (me) on the 13th of September every year.

So instead of coming full circle I am instead standing at the start of a spiral, a labyrinth, like the one in the back yard of the house I was born in. I’m not looking to get flighty and overly spiritual when I say that this spiral of brick laid flat on the ground constantly comes at me like a metaphor and if it’s true that religion, folklore and superstition are all different ways of us humans assigning patterns to a world we can’t comprehend then I am full on for this method if it can help decipher this new code of unusual feeling.