Blood calls

I'm pretty tight with my birthdad, which is pretty unusual. When you think of birthfathers, you usually don't think of them in the present. You think of them as some jerk who runs off as soon as he finds out there's a kid. Unless you know a birthfather who DOESN'T conform to that image, anyway.

My b-dad, or my "Pops", has been in my life for about three and a half years now. We found each other the summer before I turned 19 (when I was about 3 months pregnant with my son). I had always intended to seek out my BP (birthparents) when I came of age. This is a lot harder than it sounds--or it usually is, anyway. But when I finally started looking, I found him pretty quickly, because he'd already been looking for me. I think the appropriate term here is "dual registry" although it was nothing official, just the reunion pages on Adoption.com.

Long story short (maybe I'll tell it to you later), we found each other, we confirmed that we were in fact who we thought we were, and later that summer, we met. My b-mom was out for Education Week at Brigham Young University, so I was able to meet her as well as my b-dad's wife and three other daughters. And, as he likes to say, I haven't been able to get rid of them since.

It's interesting all the things we have in common. Music. Food. Food we don't like. Books. Movies. Not to mention physical features.

On the flip side, I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard from my b-mom since our meeting three and a half years ago. She also has kids, who don't know I exist. I don't know their names, or anything about them. Contact is minimal where it occurs at all.

Most of the time, I just shrug it away. Yeah, it bothers me, but it's not my choice to make, and there's nothing I can really do about it. But there are times when I wonder what I'm missing, what they're missing.

Not all adoption stories have happy endings. But I'll tell you--I think the happier ones come from open adoptions. But that's another blog. =)


L to R: Samantha, Danielle, Valerie, Cydney Jo