'I went from having zero biological relatives other than my children to having a sibling only a few years older than me.'
, my life turned into a telenovela. I was no longer my parents’ perfect little Italian daughter but a Colombian adoptee, raised to know nothing about her birth culture. All I knew was my birth mother’s name from my adoption paperwork, that I was a lighter-medium skinned Colombian and that the orphanage said I was likely a mestiza In 2017, about four years after I found out that I was an international adoptee, I decided to do a 23andMe DNA test.
It had been all I’d known of my culture growing up, but it always felt wrong. Like there was more to me. And Before I knew I was adopted I had grown up on stories of my father tending goats in Italy and my mother washing clothes in a stream in Portugal. It was always instilled into me to have pride in our culture ... just not my birth culture.
Finally, there was someone else out there like me. After years of feeling like the broken, weird, outsider in my adoptive family, there was someone else. I really tried to not get my hopes up, but I had started to think about the possibility of visiting my sibling once we got to know each other better. And I had hope of finally having someone in my family that I could get along with.
I told practically everyone in my life about the exchange. My husband, parents, friends and my group of mom friends online. I was that excited. The only one who had a hard time with it was my mother. She grew quiet the first time I mentioned it to her over the kitchen table at her house, as my dad urged me to visit this sibling I had just “met” online.
They had both known about me for months, looked up my blog, and social media, and they had both decided that it would be easier to just not tell me about the eldest of the two, Jamie . Sam wanted to try for a relationship with me, and Jamie wanted no part of it. For them it was the best solution to pretend Jamie didn’t exist.
When it comes to reunions of birth families, they are often not like the movies. There’s heartbreak, anger, numbness and general confusion. People often expect an instant connection with their biological relatives because they share blood, but that can take some time or often never fully develops.
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