Before the Beginning

This is the first post of which I (Steve) hope are many.  It’s a little long so please bear with me as I want to give you the background leading up to all this excitement.  My name is Steven, a name that I now know was given me by Cathie at birth.  I was born in Lansing and was immediately given up for adoption.  The information I had about my birth family and the first three years of my life fit on two sheets of letter size paper, single sided, double spaced.  Not much information, but it did say my birth mother was pretty.  That part was right.

I wasn’t adopted until I was three.  Cathie says I missed out on all that early age-bonding stuff.  I think she’s right since I personally can be stand-offish, sometimes slow to make friends, and generally uncomfortable in crowds.  It’s interesting that none of that has been true over the last week and a half as I’ve met, texted, and talked with so many of you.  My (adopted) family is awesome.  My mom and dad are full of grace and love and have given me everything I’ve ever needed.  I have a wonderful younger sister who has been my confidante through this entire process of contacting my birth family and talking with my folks.  And, I had grandparents that spoiled my sister and me, sent us both to college, and made certain we knew we were special our entire lives.

Bill shared in his original Facebook post that I had been searching for Cathie for a long time.  I had missed her my entire life.  As a child I hated the children’s book “Are You My Mother?”,  not because I didn’t have a mom (I did) but because it reminded me that I also had another mother out there that I wanted to know.  My entire life I’ve often thought about her and wished I could talk with her or give her a hug.  It bothered me, especially after I became a father, that she might wonder where I was and if I was OK.  When I was in my forties, my grandmother told my wife that I once said that my father was dead when I was first adopted.  Given that was right around 1965, I thought there might be a possibility that he may have died in Vietnam.  So, I pulled all the Vietnam casualty records for the years 1962 through 1965 and searched through all the data to try to find someone who had been from the Lansing area and about the age I guessed he would have been.  That resulted in nothing.  I also searched the family finder websites to no avail.  I had come to the conclusion that if I was ever going to hug my birth mother it would be when we met in heaven.

This is where the story started to turn for the best.  My wife has always been worried about not knowing my family health history and asked me to take one of the DNA tests on the market.  I finally agreed last fall and took one.  When I sent it in to be processed, I offhandedly mentioned to my sons that the results might reveal a half sibling out there in the world.  But honestly, I didn’t take it that seriously at the time.  I’ll share what happened next in my next post.