Last month I unexpectedly met my biological father. He lives in Florida and we’ve been in touch for the past two years, first connecting when his son messaged me on 23&me, saying, “Hi Meghan. I just recently got my results back and see that you are listed as my half sister. I'm not sure how accurate this is and wanted to find our connection. What do you know about your mother and father?”
I knew that my biological mother kept my birth a secret from my biological father, namely because they met in Hawaii and she went back to the mainland’s East Coast and they never talked again. It just takes one time, you know?
My newly discovered brother’s message didn’t surprise me - of course I assumed that there were people who shared my DNA just living their lives fully unaware of my existence. These people have always been a nebulous concept, wholly out of reach, and never real.
But then I found myself in Miami and my sister coordinated a way for us to meet up with our biological father, just 35 minutes north of the city. It was a joyful meeting, with his sisters joining us, quick to share photos of everyone in the large extended family and openly embrace us. “This is your cousin, this is your uncle, here are photos of our life in Haiti, this is what our life was like when we moved to New York.” They ordered Haitian food and it felt like a baptism into a world that finally existed somewhere outside of my imagination.
Still, it is all very complex. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to marinate in big feelings and give weighty topics time to unfold; to allow myself to be unattached from figuring out what something means or having to take any next steps, at least immediately. Navigating estrangement and abandonment from my adopted parents makes me cautious about jumping feet first into a whole new family, as if to serve as a replacement. And honestly? I don’t even know if that’s what I would be consciously or unconsciously doing. I can’t understand how all of these components and separate realities fit together, so for now, I’m just letting everything be.
I’m in a class at the moment and we had to write a Haibun poem for an assignment, which is a block of prose concluded with a haiku. Unsure of what to write about, I scrolled through my camera roll for inspiration and found a candid photo that my sister took on the day that we met our biological father. I stared at that photo, noting the magnitude of its significance. It could serve as my poem’s subject and more so, serve as a good opportunity to dip my toes into some of my feelings around the matter.
Anyways, here’s a start:
Do you see me picking at my fingers? It’s a thing I do when my emotions move faster than my mind understands them. Electric currents race through my limbs, down to my digits and I reflexively excavate their jitters from my being, leaving behind sore craters. My dad always noticed this subconscious behavior of mine and now I’m sitting next to a man who is also my father, my biological one, for the first time. Is he noticing it too?
Herby is this missing piece of my identity. His dark features and a smile I recognize unlock a heritage, a history, a culture that have always been vacant from my soul and my being. He is the reason that my skin never looked like anyone I ever called family.
Being adopted sets you in between worlds, never squarely in a concrete reality. There’s the world, in my case, that the legal system assigned to me at just a few days old. It’s painted with “Oh, how lucky you are to be adopted into such a good family!”, “Think about how much worse things could have been for you!”, and “I don’t see your skin color, it doesn’t matter to me!” But there’s another world, one that is only accessible to those of us forced to reckon with the duality of assumed security and personal identity. This world only lives in daydreams. It’s colored with “What if’s.”, and “Maybe things could have been different.”, and “I recognize myself in these people.” I don’t actively think about these disparate worlds, but my fingers show otherwise.
Somewhere in between I find myself rudderless No destination
What a special moment. Stories don’t have to be neat to be meaningful. 💜
Beautiful.