As we move through our lives, we all have profound experiences. Marriage. Birth of a child. Death of a parent. New job. Loss of a job or some other experience. There is a small group of us that have an experience that is unique to us. Discovering you are not alone in the world.
I am adopted and two weeks ago I discovered I have a younger brother.
I have always known I was adopted. When I would complain about the kids in the schoolyard picking on me because I was adopted, my mother put it into perspective in a way that a 6 year-old could understand. “Tell them, “she said, “you are special. You were chosen, not born”
Though we may not articulate it, adoptees will tell you their main issue with being adopted is there is no one in the family that “looks like me.”
As I moved through my adult years, I was constantly being asked why I didn’t search out my birth parents. The reason was personal to me. I felt being “chosen” meant my parents were my parents. End of story. I also felt I had no right to, one day, show up on a stranger’s doorstep with a cheery, “Hi Mom.” More often than not, that ended in disaster and, frankly, I already had parents so there was no need to fill that gap in my life.
Visits to the doctor’s office were always interesting. A common question was family history. I would tell them heart disease ran in the family but that didn’t apply to me. This would, of course, be greeted with a quizzical look on the doctor’s face. I would then tell the doc I was adopted and had no clue about that sort of thing. The inevitable response was, “Don’t you want to know?” My reply was always no followed by my explaining life is a crap shoot so I’ll deal with whatever comes along.
In his later years, my father, would constantly ask if I wanted a copy of my birth record. I always refused because, as I told him, “You are my father and always will be.” The only clue he ever gave me was that I was Hungarian but other than that he knew I wasn’t interested.
So what changed for me?
A couple of years after our grandson was born my daughter decided to do an Ancestry DNA test. This was done to see if there were any genetic traits she should be worried about. What Ancestry also also does is to show you people who you may be genetically linked to. There were a couple of images she sent me from this list along with , “My god, this person looks like you.” My response was always, “So what?”
My father was ex-miltary with a Canadian Armed Forces career that stretched from a stint in England during WWW II to the Cold war during the 1950’s. It was while he was stationed in Vancouver that I was adopted in 1952. My mother, prior to that had a miscarriage and the medical wisdom at that time was to inform the woman they no longer had the ability to get pregnant. Thus the decision to adopt.
My father loved to tell how I became “chosen”. Apparently the first time he held me I snuggled up to him and promptly went to sleep. He turned to my mother and said, “He’s a keeper.” Not a bad way to be chosen.
When my father passed away a few years ago, his military records were handed to me. Those records were an inch-thick pile of papers and, one day this past January, I decided to take a look and one record leapt out at me. It was a memo from his superior in 1953 requesting a delay in his next posting to Kingston. The gist of the delay was that my formal adoption hearing was to be held in June 1954. He was concerned my birth mother would contest it and in British Columbia the period to contest was one year while in Ontario it would be two years.
I sent this record to my daughter and she agreed this was a bit odd. Then she urged me to get my Birth and Adoption Records from British Columbia. I thought about it for a couple of weeks and sent in the application in early February. When they arrived, it was a huge surprise.
Turns out I was the second of two births, that I was Hungarian, that my Birth Mother was 22 at the time and came from a small farming town in Southern Alberta. The most puzzling aspect of the record was the area for the Birth Father was blank. I now jokingly tell people that I am also the product of an “Immaculate Conception”.
I shared this document with my daughter and she promptly replied, “Holy shit Dad, one of the people on my list has the same last name as your Birth Mother.” I then gave her permission to discretely contact this individual. She did and asked if he would like to see the birth record. A couple of days later she received a reply along the lines of, “Holy shit, that’s my mother’s signature.”
Which is how I met my brother who lives in Vancouver and discovered his story is even crazier than mine.
For those of you that know me you will totally understand my brother’s first words to me: “Now that I have an older brother, I now have some one to blame.”
He regarded my daughter’s reaching out to him as being yet another person from Ancestry who is most likely a 5th cousin. That disappeared when he saw his mother’s signature.
He grew up as an only child in Vancouver, or so he thought, within a large collection of Ukrainian relatives. (So much for being Hungarian as noted on the Birth Record.) At no time during his 69 years did any of his mother’s sisters and family disabuse him of being an only child. He was just as amazed as I was that he not only had a brother but that we had an elder sibling out there. It was only when he asked them about this that it turned out they knew we had an older sister who was born in Calgary and also put up for adoption.
He also told me this sort of brought some clarity to a 5-year gap in our mother’s history. When she first got pregnant she disappeared and resurfaced in 1954 when she sent the family her wedding photo. I suspect the fact she was married was why my father was twitchy about being posted to Kingston.
What was my brother doing on Ancestry? Turns out a member of the clan didn’t look like any other member of the clan. They suspected he was adopted so they all did the DNA test. They were correct but the story behind that shall remain within the family.
So there you have it, an adoption story that worked out. To answer a question you are all probably asking- “Have you met him?”- the answer is no but that will eventually happen. In the meantime, we are regularly talking to each other and thoroughly enjoy the fact we are so much alike and both have exactly the same question: “Who is our older sister and where is she?”
