Expectations

My first father asked me about expectations last week.  What were my expectations going into reunion?  It got me thinking about what I thought I'd get out of a reunion with him.  I think that so often we focus so much on our mothers, that we forget about the fathers.  I can see why.  Our mothers are the ones who carried us.  They gave birth to us.  It is our bond with them that is debated about in the Primal Wound theory.  So naturally I can see why we so often focus on them.  After all, a woman gives birth so without a doubt she's the mother.  In some cases the father is really unknown, or he doesn't know, or he walks away and can pretend it's not his kid.  So I get it I do.  But I don't think we should always write them off so easily.

I wrote mine off from a young age.  I'll admit to that.  My parents knew about him.  They knew his first name, his birthday (and how young he was), as well as a few traits.  They had family information about both my first parents that they never shared.  Before anyone sees this as an attack on my parents, it isn't.  My parents are awesome.  I love them to death.  And I honestly think they got so caught in in the mentality that I was their kid and nobody else's that they forgot.  They don't see me as anyone else's kid but their own.  So they never looked at the files.  They never thought that I would want to know those things.  And they probably thought it would be harder for me to deal with knowing my first father was in the picture when I was born.  For whatever reason, they kept all information about him from me.  I had to find it on my own.

I never even thought about him until I was a teenager.  I was so caught up in the idea that being adopted didn't matter and hero worshiping my first mother that the thought of him never crossed my mind.  My parents were always really open about me being adopted.  It was never a secret or something to be ashamed of in my family.  But just because it was that way in my family doesn't mean I didn't hear it elsewhere.  Kids can be cruel.  Whenever someone would ask me about being adopted, I'd tell them I was ok with  it.  It wasn't any different, our family just came together in a different way.  And someday when I was older, I was going to find my first mother (who at the time I called my birth mother).  That's when the questions would start.  What if my mother was raped?  What if my father abandoned my mother?  What if she wasn't a good person?  Why would I want to find her someday?  What if she didn't want to be found?  After a while, I started to believe those things too.  I was scared of what I would find, but I searched anyway.

Learning about my first father in my non-identifying information was hard.  I had never truly considered him before.  I never really took the time to think about what he meant to me.  It's silly.  I'm a smart girl.  I know it takes both a man and a woman to make a baby.  I get half my DNA from him.  So I should have thought about it, but I didn't.  I guess it's really hard to picture someone you know absolutely nothing about.  I started digging around online and learned my first parents at some point had been married.  I was thrilled.  I was happy I had come out of something that was good, a real relationship.  Even if they had gotten divorced, they still had a real marriage at one point.  I couldn't have been happier!

Then when I started talking to my first mother, she started to tell me things about my first father.  It wasn't all good.  I know a lot of things about him that daughters don't always want to know about their fathers.  It was hard for me to think about what he would be like when I was hearing things like he was a "player" and wasn't "exclusive".  As we kept emailing, I started asking more questions about him.  What was he like?  What kind of person was he?  I couldn't ask him and respect her wishes to be the one to tell him we were in touch, so I had to go through her.  And she started to tell me wonderful things.  Things like he's a great father and a wonderful husband.  Things like he'd do anything for his family and spends lots of time with his kids.  For someone's who's father wasn’t around all that much as a kid, it was hard to hear but wonderful at the same time.  Yet I had no clue what to expect.  He could after all feel the same way about reunion as my first mother.

I think my expectations have been blown out of the water.  I never ever would have expected that we would have the kind of relationship where we would send text messages back and forth, email and talk once a week, and even that I would have to make sure to check in with him so he doesn't worry.  He's my father and I love him.  I never would have expected that.