I’m at Vancouver airport, about to head to my gate to fly to meet my aunt and cousin for the first time….I hope I can hold it together when I meet them. Probably best not to ugly cry immediately!! I’m getting emotional thinking about it. This has to be one of the most surreal and most incredible things that has ever happened to me.
I never expected them to be so welcoming, but I am so grateful that they are. My heart is very full right now 😍
As I spend my last evening in Winnipeg before flying to Vancouver tomorrow, I can’t help but be reminded of a pivotal day in early March when my DNA mystery got revealed….in fact, I just had dinner at the same Chop restaurant where I wrote my first message to my aunt and cousin 😊
I was awaiting my DNA results from Ancestry and, while having breakfast on my second-to-last day here, decided to check their website.
OMG….I’m 58% Norwegian and 37% Swedish?!?!? I’m a freaking VIKING!!! 🇳🇴❤😮😁 This explains soooo much!!!! And then there it was….my DNA match list, with my aunt and cousin right at the top!!! I had been waiting 51 years for this moment and I cannot begin to tell you how it feels to finally have some inkling of who you are and where you come from. I only wish I were a poet so I could adequately describe how and what I was feeling…..
Needless to say, I was a tad distracted for the next couple of hours while I tried to piece everything together (thanks to social media). I really did need to work, however, so I ended up enlisting one of my best friends, Carolyn, to help continue some of the digging.
Well, be careful what you wish for, Donna!! While I was off working, Carolyn figured the whole thing out and had sent me about 28 messages with her findings 😂
It was one of the most memorable, incredibly surreal days in my life. To finally look at someone’s photo and see your own face reflected back, is not something I had ever experienced before. It’s quite an overwhelming feeling to see where the shape of your eyes, cleft in your chin and crook in your smile come from. Likely something many may take for granted — perhaps because it has always been there. It made me feel connected, grounded.
I ended up talking to Carolyn a lot that day and, thankfully, we both agreed that I would NOT do my usual overanalytical, analysis by paralysis routine before writing to my aunt and cousin. So….sitting in the restaurant I just came from, I messaged both of them and hit “send”. 😁 It was the longest 24 hours of my life, but when I pulled into my driveway the next night, I opened Ancestry and there was a message from my cousin, which started ” Hi Cuz!!!!” ❤ And I let out a big sigh of relief. Home at last.
Over the years, many people and friends have suggested that I search for my biological family, but I always hesitated, not wanting to upset my parents. However, that reason began to lose its weight after my Dad had been gone for 20 years and my Mom for almost 10. So why was I holding back?
I believe it was equal parts of a fear of uncertainty, possible rejection, guilt and what others might think that held me back.
All of this was becoming incongruent with who I was becoming as a person — and, being curious by nature, I wanted to know “my story”. So, when a friend informed me last summer that Quebec had opened its birth records and also suggested I have my DNA tested, it was game on 😊
I was born in August 1967 in Montreal, Quebec. Nine months later, Edna and Tom Bird, a couple from Bedford (a small town in the Eastern Townships) adopted me.
I have always known that I was adopted (so no identity crisis here due to a surprise discovery). Although I had, for the most part, a seemingly idyllic upbringing; I have struggled for a good portion of my life with a feeling of not belonging or fitting in, of being different.
I was adopted. My parents were the age of my other friends’ grandparents. I was the youngest of all my cousins. I was the biggest kid in my class many years. I was an only child. I was also a very sensitive, intelligent child — the seeds for a lifelong search for my “tribe” were planted in those years.
My parents could not have children and I was always told that they chose me, so I never felt like I had an awful lot of angst about being adopted. I didn’t really spend a lot of time thinking about it, to be honest.
The angst came with being told by my mother that “it would break her heart if I were to look for my biological family”. Fortunately for her, the adoption records in Quebec have been closed until the summer of 2018.
And this is what has brought me here: in 6 days I will be meeting my very first biological relatives, an aunt and cousin, in Northern British Columbia.
I cannot wait!!!!
The Mindful Birdie 