The Search for Biological Relatives

To find finding biological relatives, it’s not like people in my home country are addicted to 23andMe or AncestryDNA. I did do two tests just to figure out those full Vietnamese each test backed up the other one. One was a Christmas present and the other one, I had a student discount before I graduated. I’ve got third to sixth cousins with emphasis on the fifth or the sixth. Nothing really close has come up.

I’ve been told in the past that the best thing I can do is go back to Vietnam and look for villagers that look like me, although I do not feel for various reasons that there’s a safe idea. What I do, you know, it’s challenging, because my parents are presumed dead so I don’t have that biological connection to people. I think that you know, I was shortchange from the get go.

There are plenty of studies to indicate the orphans in adulthood face different challenges, especially during midlife because attachment did not happen. There are plenty of studies on Attachment, whether it’s human infants or cats, for that matter. The old stranger experiments, but I think for me not feeling that biological connection for me, and people like me, we like to think that adoption is equal. That solves the problems. I think in Christian circles, especially it’s fluffy thing every November during orphan Sunday, but I’ve only met one person one pastor, in particular, the understood that adoption comes with trauma and you have to deal with that trauma.

You have to deal with things that you as a parent weren’t responsible for. And I think as adults, we have to deal with things that we weren’t responsible for. I think losing your parents is trauma. I think being a given another set is trauma. I think when you grow up with biologicals, that you see treated differently, that’s trauma in a way or a reminder there of and I think later in life once you’re really orphaned, there’s trauma.

When biologicals lose their parents, it’s a first time thing but for adoptees like me or my daughter, when I go my daughter will lose her third set of parents. So I think I think there’s just a difference. I think when we look at men and women, I remember somebody put it that at my church that women are equal, but they’re not the same. And I think adoptees we may be equal in our parents eyes, but we’re not the same. And I think that that’s that’s just always something that has to be recognized.

And you’re always walking around with this feeling like you don’t have that tied to the past. You don’t have a family history. I think with life insurance, it actually worked in my favor because there wasn’t a family history of any debilitating or chronic or degenerative illnesses. So I had a pretty clean file and got a nice like 30 year term, which is great. But you also don’t have that connection.

I can’t look at my mother or grandmother or her mother or go through a family album and say, That’s me. Those are my eyes. That’s where that came from. I have no like cats a lot. I don’t know whether I was just laying in a ditch was found that a cat came up and bird I don’t know if my biological mother was a dog person. I don’t have those answers. I don’t know.

You know, I I took singing lessons once it was $60 a session that I could barely afford. I must have done it 10 or 15 weeks before figuring out I couldn’t sing. It would have been really nice to know if like my mom could sing or not. That would have been of great help. Because I know you know I have a friend named Zoe McDow and her father can sing and her mother can sing mother can sing amazingly. So I think just knowing where the biology is that is helpful for some things.