Life is Strange
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I may have more brothers. My father spent the first dozen or so years of his life being raised by someone besides his mother. I had heard this story for years, but no one shared any names or details.
After finding my own birth daughter, the origins of my father began to interest me more. My sister and I decided to see what we could discover, never dreaming we would find out what we ultimately did.
Our first attempts didn't get us far. We wrote an attorney whom we had heard was an old friend of his. He replied a few months later and told my sister that he was "more our uncle's friend than our father's" and had shared our query with our uncle. This uncle, he said, was willing to share some things with us. We learned he had cancer and thought perhaps his inevitable demise had made him want to let us know some secrets. Regrettably he never returned our calls before his death.
One day, out of the blue, our mother mentioned that an elderly gentleman who had recently passed away at her work had the same name as our father's natural father. While we had her talking, she mentioned the last name of the people who had raised our father.
Being the sleuth I am, a name was all I needed. I began pouring over local obituaries for a clue. It didn't take me long to discover a man who had died and mentioned a foster son named Jimmy, my fathers first name was James. It added up to what I had heard: older couple the year of his death compared to my father's age, etc.
Then I did a family tree through other obits and we began contacting relatives. Many were young and just referred us to other older family members. Eventually we reached an elderly woman in KY who was the granddaughter of the man and woman who had raised my father! She was a few years older than him but remembered him well and even had a picture she sent us. She also told us how her grandparents had loved him so much and that the true reason our grandmother had reclaimed him was they had both passed away. There had never been a legal adoption involved and many other new details about his and my grandma's lives.
Then came the BIG news. She said my father had later allowed another family member to adopt his two young sons!!! We were dumbfounded; my parents married in their early 20's and had 5 children, I being the oldest.
She gave me the name of the people who had adopted them, so I again pulled up my family tree and they did indeed have 2 sons. I had a friend run the names and got their dates of birth. Interestingly, one was a year older than me, and the other a year younger. That told me they were not my own mother's children, as I have a sister 18 months younger than myself. But I recalled another family 'story' being that my mom and dad had been separated just before my sister's birth. So, maybe my dad had been fooling around...hmmmm.
Now for the confusing part. I am a reunited birth mother and spend endless hours reuniting and counseling other triad members. I am very pro reunion; yet, the thought of notifying my own possible brothers unnerves me. Do I want to open Pandora's Box? What holds me back? It is not a disillusion of my parents harmony. My Dad has no untarnished image already. I, of course, did some background checking on these men. They are good wholesome people from what I can tell. It is weird, but it seems to be some of the same issues I dismiss when others face them. Perhaps they will not like me? What if they reject me? The whole gambit of things everyone faces and I tell them not to pay heed to. Life is strange.
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