Nature/nuture (Family Part 4)

I was warned to not go into this with any expectations, that no matter how simple they were, to have them meant to leave myself open to disappointment. The problem is, with something this big, how could you NOT? I mean seriously, my whole life I have had sporadic moments of "whats", those moments in time where I would wonder how life could have been different, moments created as products of bitter arguments with my parents or from glimpses of shared facial features in complete strangers walking through the mall. I wondered what my biological parents looked like, what they were doing with their lives, who they were and how they thought.

Wednesday night brought with it not only an e-mail received from a woman claiming to be my birth mother, but also the potential of pictures, as she was a member of the rapidly growing social network of Facebook. I read and reread the e-mail from her repeatedly, looking often at the attached picture of her and my birth father, searching for any resemblance, any glimpse of commonality, eyes, ears, nose, something, anything, but couldn't find one. Was there something I was missing? Here they were, my parents, the people whose genetic soup had created my existence and I could not see any physical similarity between us. Had nurture truly taken that big of a course, or were genetics as varied as they say, that some kids don't look a lot like either parent?

My initial thought was of a switch at birth, that somehow the hospital had accidentally mistaken me for another newborn. Being a man of probabilities, it soon dawned on me that the hospital workers were surely more careful than that, besides, how many American male newborns could there have been in a Japanese hospital in Osaka in 1975?

Finding her on Facebook, with a picture of the two of them at an age close to when I was born, was a trippy feeling to be sure. I searched again for subtle clues in the facial features of youth and again there was nothing, in fact I recall thinking to myself that my buddy Mark Doughtery looked more like them than I did.

I spent twenty minutes drafting a reply, searching for what to say and how to say it. For me, a man of many, many words, the fact that it took me twenty minutes reminded me of how soupish my brain had become. So I just went with simplicity, "nice to hear from you, hope all is well, don't have any pictures so here is a friend request as I found you on Facebook."

A few minutes after sending the e-mail I logged on to Facebook to check a message, knowing full well that there was a friend request floating somewhere off in the ether but that the probability of receiving a response that night was slim. Little did I realize that she was waiting by her computer, as anxious and ready for contact as a mother would be who has been waiting to see her child for the first time in 34 years.

There it was, a little red "1" icon in the lower right corner of my home page, letting me know that I had a notification, that something on my profile had changed. I clicked on the icon and up popped the note that Laura Ann Fiske Moore had accepted my friend request.

Remember that word trippy....?

To know that I now had absolute contact with the lady claiming to be my birth mother, that she had access to my profile and could check me out, to see who I was and what I looked like was so surreal. Would I disappoint, would she judge, would she be okay with what she saw?

I was just starting to look at her pictures and profile (as the road goes both ways and I had access to her life as well) when up popped a Facebook chat window from Laura Fiske. My bio mother was saying hello....

God, I cannot even begin to describe the emotion, I think that they all ran together so much that I felt like I had none, that my body had hit a state of numbness. I wrote hello back and, for the next two hours, proceeded to ask and answer questions from a woman I never knew but who was obviously ecstatic to have found me. To her credit, with as excited as she was and how much I am sure she wanted to say and ask, she was incredibly sweet about it, always reminding me that if any of this was too much she would completely understand. We talked a little about how I was, how I felt about all of this and the topic soon switched to her and her family.

My entire life, from the moment I noticed that the black hair that grew atop my brother's head was vastly different from any other hair I had ever seen in my family and from the time I noticed that upon docking at a marina I was off like a shot, asking every boat's captain if I could board to ask questions of people I had never met while my brother was content to find an empty stretch of dock where he could catch dinner, had I wondered if I had any biological siblings. Was there anyone out there that looked like, talked like and acted like I did?

I have watched and been a part of so many families in my lifetime (I seem to have a knack for integrating myself into other people's lives) that I wondered if I was missing something. Why were the interactions between most siblings so different than mine, would any sisters or brothers who shared my biological make-up act and interact differently with me than Peter did?

Facebook is a marvel...

Turns out I do have siblings... Four of them, all half sisters, two from her first marriage and two from his. It also turns out that they, at least the two on my bio mom's side, have known about me since they were able to understand what the word brother meant. I was told how excited they were to meet me, how they had been calling me Johnathon for years and how they wanted so much to meet me.

How could they be excited? They had never met me; what if I were some serial killer, some angry Republican, some lost soul looking for money? One of them even created a Facebook account that evening solely because she had heard that I was found...

Can you imagine my thoughts, my feelings at this time? I couldn't then and still cannot fully gather them into an understandable experience. Somewhere between nervousness and excitement my mind had shut down. Slowly it seems to be making sense; as I gain more knowledge, open myself up more to the opportunity, my mind is slowing its reel, I am once again less dizzy from the world's spin.