Before I get started on this topic, I want to tell everyone who may disagree with me - save your electricity. I have both a stepsister and natural siblings, and have had a lifetime of experience growing up with both.
I never found out or heard who my older stepsister's father was (and I figure it was never any of my concern). Linda was born when my mother was 19, and seven years elapsed between that event and the days she met, dated, and married my father. Although Dad never legally adopted my stepsister, she called him "Daddy" like her three younger siblings did. I often dropped the "step" part and disliked the "half-sister" phrase - to me, she was my big sister and I was her "baby" sister.
Now, to those of you who are adoptees who never knew your own natural parents and were handed to a couple willing to raise you as their "son" or "daughter" - I feel for you. I really, really do. But there are too many of you out there that push your way into the family or families that that natural mother or father may be a part of without checking to see if they WANT to be contacted by a child of the past.
Maybe they are dead (like the woman who called me three years after my mother died and claimed she was my half-sister, five years my senior, but no mention made of my stepsister who was older than us both). Maybe they don't WANT to admit they made a "long-ago mistake". Maybe their current family is content they way they are. Maybe they don't want to be contacted. Any or all of these reasons may be true.
In the case of this woman who called me, she had documentation )she sent me a copy of the paperwork completed by the agency who placed her - describing the mother as a blue-eyed blonde of 21, a Catholic of German/Polish descent.
The only thing she had right was the roots of German and Polish decent. My mother was a brownette-haired woman, with dark eyes (like me and Linda). The year this stranger was born, Mom was twenty-two, and Lutheran. She had not yet met my father, who was baptized and raised as a Roman Catholic. When Dad asked her to marry him, she consented and converted to Catholicism,
It's altogether possible that someone who knew my mother used her name to place this little girl for adoption. But it wasn't my mother - not by a long shot - and I resented her intrusion into our lives.
Several people who knew my mom before she and my dad met heard the story and agreed. I don't know how many years Dad knew her before he proposed marriage, but he said he didn't know this woman either. Or of another daughter other than Linda, whom he had met.
I wrote this woman, telling her the reasons why my mother was not hers and if she bothered us again, the next letter would come from my attorney.
She's never bothered us since, but adopted children who are adults searching for parents is a sore subject with me.
There are legal offices and attorneys in every state, who can do the legwork for you. Disruption of the natural parents' lives - and maybe your own - is not necessary.
If the natural parents would wish and welcome contact, there is surely some sort of document in the files. If no such document exists, the mother and/or father don't wish to establish ties - and the matter should rest there.
The parents of your life are the ones who have raised you. They love you and consider your their son or daughter. Especially if the parent in question is deceased - don't go on your own into a life you know nothing about. The bald way this woman disrupted my family's life that Sunday night was unwelcome, unwanted, and unexpected.
MaryJanine.
