(no subject)
It's a weird thing to find your birth family. Working out where they belong in your life. And where you belong in theirs. When you know only the parents and siblings you grew up with, there's a sort of ladder of kinship priorities which shift as you go through different events that bring new categories of relative into your life-getting married, siblings getting married, birth of children, nephews and nieces, grandchildren and so on.
If I were to set out in order of importance the families of which I had been a part up to August 6 last year, the list would look like this-
My wife, children and grandchildren
My adopted nuclear family (the one I grew up in, including Grandma, Mum's mum)
Sandra's nuclear family (she has no wider family, but has a half sister she has never met)
My extended family (i.e., that of my adopted parents)
(I won't attempt to fit children's in-laws in the rankings here: I am friendly with Sam's parents, good friends with Polly's.)
Suddenly, I find myself a part of another family, one which I have always known about and wondered about. And I find we have different takes on this new relationship. For them (it seems to me), it's their family at last united-no more sad St Patrick's Days, as Cathrine movingly put it in a comment online shortly after I first rang our mother. For me, it's my family suddenly expanded. And it's strange to have people suddenly become so important to me, and such an integral part of my life; people who, had our circumstances been those of over 95 percent of other families in 1951, I would have known all 57 years of my life.
A couple of days after our first contact, my friend Rory asked my how my week had been. I told him it had been an exciting one-less so than getting married, or my children being born, but more exciting than graduating or ... something else, I can't remember what... I told him it was about on a par with my grandchildren being born.
We haven't had the awkwardness that I've heard some adoptees have experienced at meeting their birth families. I used to have two sisters; now I have four. The main awkwardness I feel is about what to call Althea. It's like the problem of what to call your mother in law-"For the first four years it was, 'Hey, you!' After that it was 'Nana'" Hazel Copeland is my mother; I call her "Mum". Althea Windschnurer (Althea Marshall when I was born) is my birth mother. I mostly call her Althea, but I have once or twice called her "Mother", which is what Cree and Cathrine mainly call her. I think this is where the awkwardness largely arises, because it sounds as if I'm holding her at arm's length if I call her Althea when my sisters are calling her Mother, and I don't want to do that. (My sister Wendy-Anne regularly calls our mother Hazel.)
Where are they in my list? Certainly ahead of my extended family, which is now reduced to two aunts by marriage (one with severe Alzheimers), plus numerous cousins. (I still look cousins up when I go north.) And definitely ahead of my in-laws (Sandra's family), with whom we seem to have far less contact now than we used to. I think pretty much on a par with my adopted siblings; perhaps, if I'm honest, a little ahead of them, at least at the moment. I'm sure that that's partly the novelty of the relationship, but I think it's also that we are enough alike to be comfortable in one another's company, and to enjoy doing the same things together. I don't think I need to feel guilty about this. After all, I'm closer to some of my friends than to my siblings, although friendships change or fade, while family is forever. I may not always have Keith or Mike or Marvin or any of a host of others, but I will always have Allen, Sue and Wendy-Anne. And now I will always have Althea and Cree and Cathrine, until we take our various departures. (And actually, I think I am likely always to have Mike)
But there's no replacing Mum and Dad. They gave me love, safety and security, as well as the odd whack in the backside when I'd earned it. I didn't go through the hardships and deprivations that my birth family went through, and I grew up in a good home. I shall always be grateful for that, and grateful to Althea for making the decision she made.