In honor of November being National Adoption Awareness Month, Portrait of an Adoption is hosting the fourth annual acclaimed series, 30 Adoption Portraits in 30 Days.  Designed to give a voice to the many different perspectives of adoption, this series will feature guest posts by people with widely varying experiences. 

By Kimberly Jones

It’s nothing new. You hear stories all the time of reunions between long lost family members.  Siblings separated as babies reunite at airports. An adult adoptee finds the biological mother who, decades earlier, gave him or her up for adoption. Someone tracks down the father who abandoned his young family and they rebuild their tattered relationship.

There is usually a camera crew hovering, and the story ends up on 60 Minutes, or Oprah or the local news. Sometimes it becomes a Lifetime movie. The reunions are always teary-eyed and include a sharing of life stories, followed by meetings of extended family members, frequent vacations to each other’s hometowns and exchanging of birthday cards as the years go on.

My story went nothing like this.

I was in my late twenties the first time it ever occurred to me to look for my two half-brothers. I’m not sure what triggered the desire to track them down, but I was new to social media, taking a break at work one day, and had already used Facebook to stalk high school classmates, former boyfriends and frenemies past. I racked my head for names to put into the “search” bar. The name of one of my two paternal half-brothers, the brother whose first name was the least common, popped into my head. I typed it in. The search returned thousands of results. I got discouraged, clicked out of Facebook and got back to work.

I had been conceived in 1977 during a very brief affair between my mother and a much younger man. I haven’t spoken to my mother in about seventeen years but even when I was a child, her story of my conception was fuzzy and ever-changing. What I do know is that, most likely, it involved a Jefferson Starship concert, some bad contraception decisions and possibly a drug or two.

The pregnancy ruined the fling (as pregnancies tend to do) and my biological father ditched my mother before her baby bump even started showing.  My mother got married to another man while I was still a baby and he raised me until they divorced when I was 13.  Less than a year later, it became apparent that my mother was too mentally ill to be a single mom, and I was adopted by family friends.

But that day at work, typing my brother’s name into Facebook, wouldn’t be my last attempt to find my long-lost siblings. Every so often, over the next several years, I would find myself in front of a computer with five minutes to kill. I would pop my brothers’ names into a search engine, along with any other little details I knew about them.  Nothing ever came up, and I never really pursued it. Sometimes I would go months and months, even a year or two, without even bothering to try. Life was busy, and it had been many years since I’d even seen their/our father.

In fact, the last time I saw my father, I was seventeen years old. He was down in my hometown of San Diego, a six-hour drive away from his Central California home.  He was in town on business with the utility company for which he had been working as long as I could remember.  I could count on my hands how many times in my life I had seen this man in person.  This last time, he picked me up in the morning from the house I shared with my adoptive parents.

He was supposed to bring his two sons, my brothers. That was the plan when we spoke over the phone about his impending visit. I didn’t realize that he wasn’t actually bringing them until he showed up at my house.  He had some strange excuse about how they had other summer plans or their mom wouldn’t let them come or something. I asked him if the boys even knew I existed. He replied “yes.” Years later I would receive confirmation of what I already knew: All of this was a lie.

The plan was for me to spend three nights with him near the beach, just hanging out.  My adoptive father was hesitant to let me go off with him. After all, what did we know about this man? I hadn’t seen him in four years.  Turns out, my adoptive father had nothing to worry about. After only a few hours out on the town, my father faked a beeper page from his office and said he had to go back up north.  He didn’t even give me the respect of doing a good job of lying. He took me home and that was that. I never saw him again.

My early childhood was spent placing monthly calls to his work phone number, with the help of my mother. We would speak for about half an hour each time about stupid things like what grades I was getting in school and what toys I l played with. He never shared details of his life. When the call ended, I would go back to living my life, which focused on school, friends, playing outside, riding my bike, Cabbage Patch Kids and the cute boy next door.

My family during those years consisted of my mother — who was losing touch with reality more and more — my stepfather, who had become our primary caretaker, and my little sister.  Talking to my “real” father every week was like talking to a distant uncle on the phone…or Santa. I enjoyed it, but it had no bearing on my life.  On some level, I understood that he was my biological father and that he had a role in my creation. But I had a dad. There was no hole in my life for him to fill and he had no desire to fill one.

As an adult looking back, so many things make sense now that didn’t make sense then, and so many things I didn’t even think about then now strike me as very, very odd. For instance, why did we call my biological father only when he was at work and never at home? Why was I never brought to his town to see his parents, siblings, wife, kids, the people who are also my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and siblings? They only lived a few hours’ drive away. I know many of them know about my existence. Did none of them ever wonder about me?

I have one memory and an accompanying photo of meeting his parents and sister when I was about two or three years old. His wife, my stepmother, was also in the photo and was holding a very tiny baby – one of my two brothers.  A couple years later, another brother would be born. I would know about him but would never meet him.

It wasn’t until I was a teenager, living with an adoptive family, that I realized how weird it is for a father to not want his child. I would see my friends’ divorced parents wrapped in these crazy custody battles and think, “wow, you mean your father is actually fighting to see you?”  I remember being floored when a girlfriend’s parents moved around their entire work schedules to make it to every one of her volleyball games. These kids knew their fathers’ home phone numbers. Unconditional love is not something I knew much about growing up, and, to this day, watching it manifest in other “normal” families is like an anthropological observation for me.

In 2010, five years after I first searched for one of my brother’s names, my sleuthing paid off. I found an email address for my youngest half brother. I wasn’t expecting to actually be successful in my search. My brother’s last name is far too common. However, with his email address, I also found his photo in a newspaper clipping and immediately recognized my own turned-up nose, my chin, my forehead and even my unruly hair.  There was no doubt this was the right person.

Despite all the time I had spent searching, I was unprepared for how I would feel should I find something.  What I felt, unsurprisingly, was panic.

Could this really be happening?  Did I really have the ability to put myself in contact with these people? What would they say? What would I say? What if they rejected me? What if the email address was wrong? What if we hit it off, become a big, happy family and I now have all these other people I have to buy Christmas presents for?  How would I ever afford this? Where would I stay when I went to visit them?

I held on to the email address for a week. It was written on a hot pink post-it note on my fridge. Every time I went into the kitchen, I would see it, and feel my stomach bounce.

Then one night, I found myself sitting on my sofa, laptop in front of me and my third glass of Chardonnay in my hand.  I had never been one who feared taking chances and certainly wasn’t new to rejection. Why was I being such a weenie over someone I had never even met?  I sent the email.

I gave him our father’s name and the other brother’s name, asking if he was related to them.  Once he responded affirmatively, I let him know, via email, that I believed I was his sister.  I don’t really remember his response, but it came back to me within minutes. A couple back and forth emails to iron out his confusion proved to me two things I already knew:  1). This was indeed my brother; and 2). He had no idea I existed.

A few more email conversations ensued over the next week or so. Photos were exchanged, shock was experienced, family resemblance was confirmed, and plans were made to have a phone conversation. Three days later, the brother I’d wondered about for thirty-two years was on the phone talking to me, a sister whom, a week earlier, he hadn’t even known existed.

That first conversation was exciting. Timelines were worked out, memories that seemed strange suddenly made sense, and we spent four hours catching up on decades. He was married, an entrepreneur, he and his wife were trying to have a baby. Our other brother was also married, had a young daughter and was a hero in the law enforcement world. My story? I was living in a one-bedroom apartment by the beach, building my freelance writing career and working on a novel about –not surprisingly- finding lost family.

He asked me if his mother had known I existed and was saddened when I told him that I believe she did. He shared with me that he wasn’t surprised to learn his father had been involved in an extra-marital affair; his parents’ relationship had always been strained. He told me how close he and his brother were, and it stung me to have missed out on that. He told me that his father’s mother was still alive, and he and his grandmother are very close. I had lost any grandparents I’d ever known many years earlier, and the thought of perhaps having a grandmother secretly thrilled me.

He said he was going to talk to his brother (“his” brother) and they would come up with a plan to approach his father (“his” father) together and then be in touch with me. He couldn’t wait to come down to visit very soon.

Cue the camera crew because this family reunion was going to blow everyone away!

Despite my best intentions to move slowly, my heart started envisioning trips to Disneyland with my new niece, shopping trips with sisters in-law and dancing with my brothers at my wedding.  The father never factored into these fantasy-plans. While he had made it clear he didn’t want a daughter, and I had long since made peace with that, I didn’t believe for a second that an entire family would reject me.

Except, that’s pretty much exactly what happened.

After about a week of not hearing a word, I texted my half-brother. The text bounced back. The same thing happened when I tried to email him.

And just as quickly as it had begun, it was done.

There would be no trips to Disneyland with my young niece, no shopping trips with sisters in-law and no dancing with my brothers at my wedding.

This was four years ago. I have not shared this story with anyone but my diary, and even that retelling was brief. I thought telling my story would be painful but, in writing this down for the first time, I have felt no more hurt than I would in telling someone that I didn’t get offered a job for which I had interviewed. It’s hard to feel rejected by someone who never bothered to get to know you in the first place.

While I’m disappointed in the way things turned out, the thing is — I do have nieces, and I have been making memories with them their whole lives. My fiancé and I have annual passes to Disneyland, and we spend lots of time there with family. Also, I do have another half-brother. He is the product of one of my mother’s marriages from before she met my biological father, and he will be an usher in my wedding in a few months.

Whatever my biological father’s reasons, or his sons’ reasons, or his family’s reasons for not accepting me into the fold, it begins and ends with them. I have no regrets. Not everyone can say that.

Kimberly Jones is a freelance writer in San Diego. She is owner of both Kimberly Jones, Literary Artist and San Diego Dog Sitting. Her passions include dog rescue, making people laugh, ridding the world of poor grammar and working on her debut novel (slowly). She can be reached via http://kimberlyjonesliteraryartist.com.

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Check out Carrie Goldman’s award-winning book Bullied: What Every Parent, Teacher, and Kid Needs to Know About Ending the Cycle of Fear