Seven Quick Takes

If you are not interested in my ramblings  about finding my first family, click away now... you've been warned. :)

~1~

I couldn't be more blessed in the first cousin I found through Ancestry.com.  She is kind and caring. She is so excited to know me!  It's been a long time since anyone has expressed that kind of emotion towards me. She would like to maintain a relationship with me even if my first mother wants nothing to do with me (fyi, "first mother" seems to be the current accepted  term for the person I grew up calling "birth mother" or "biological mother", so I'm going to use that).

~2~

She's also quite the geneologist!  She has been working on the family tree for over a decade and has over 10,000 people on it. She has not yet shared it with me, as we haven't heard back from my first mother. I hope soon she will be able to.  I do know now that I'm distantly related to Barbara Bush, Tom Brokaw, and Humphry Bogart!  To go from no blood relatives to those is quite exciting!

~3~

We have exchanged pictures (not of my first mother yet in case she wants to do that herself) and my cousin says that I had the same type of cowlick in my bangs that my mother did as a kid, and two of my kids do now.  That part of my hair always has (has!) a mind of it's own and has been the bane of my hairstyling existence. Now I know who to blame! LOL!  Seriously though, it's things like this that make it easier to grow up with biological relatives.  "I have something that bothers me, but at least my mother, brother, and cousin do as well."  Not, "Ugh, what is WRONG with me? I'm all alone."

~4~

I'm finally able to get a little medical information.  She wants to share some of the "bigger deals" over the phone instead of through email. I can't wait to be able to say with certainty "I have cancer and parkinsons in my family tree"  (or whatever) instead of "I dunno, I'm adopted" in each of our countless medical appointments.

~5~

In large part, I'm doing this for my kids.  THEY deserve to know who their relatives are, regardless of the decision made by two people 44 years ago.   Heck, *I* deserve it, but I can understand the reasons why people made the decisions they made and why, because they've built their lives on secrets, they can't deal with it now, either.  But my kids were no part of this. It really bothered me how affected by my adoption they are. I honestly never thought of that before I had them.

~6~

My cousin has emailed my mother saying, "we need to talk, call me when you are alone"....so now we wait. I think this is why alcohol was invented.

~7~

I'm beginning to relate to Pandora.



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