A few years ago, I received an email from my mother-in-law.  The subject was, “this and that.”  The message read that a neighbor, whom I had grown up with, had received a phone call from a man who was looking for the biological father of his wife and it was urgent that I contact him.

 

Background: As a young man, I met a girl who was a beauty with a troubled childhood.  Her mother had been in an auto accident that robbed her both of her husband and her beauty.  It left her bitter with two children to raise.  She was emotionally imbalanced and very abusive.  I was 19, the young lady was was 17.  She called one morning saying that her brother had beaten her and asked me to come and get her. I went to her mother’s house and found her badly beaten.  I took her with me and we left for a town across the state.  I didn’t realize till after we were living together that she was violent, very unbalanced and very pregnant.  We both knew that we would not last as a couple and she didn’t want the responsibility of raising a child and the concept of the father keeping the child in those days was the closest thing there was to an impossibility.  Trying to find options and loath to let go we kept the child for two months, but the reality was that my girlfriend’s mother would end up with the child.  This was a fate that was unthinkable, There was no reasonable option but to put the child up for adoption.  So we put her in a basket and sent her down the Nile, knowing that whatever lay ahead was safer than what was known.  We were able to customize much of her future.  We could select the age, religion and education of her adoptive parents, whether they were urban or rural and much more.

 

Time passed, her mother and I didn’t last, but not one day went by that I didn’t send my daughter good thoughts, prayers, if you will.  Every June 5th, (her birthday), I raised a glass to her.

 

Story resumes: So I make the phone call and a woman answers, ...I know the voice, it’s my child, she sounds like her mother.

 

We had been trying to find each other for years, but the State had misspelled my middle name, so whenever we called the State there was no one that existed of that name so - no information.

 

My wife and I flew my daughter up to Seattle to see us and it was great.  It was in her words,

“like being in high school and falling in love.”  She has her mother’s looks and my sense of humor.  She has an incredible husband and three outstanding boys.  She is an amazing singer and the entire family is very artistically talented.

 

If life isn’t strange It’s nothing!

 

Her husband, an amazing artist, also adopted had been working construction in Denver barely making it.  One day she calls and says she has gathered all their funds and is buying him a one way ticket to Seattle.  We meet him at the airport...two weeks later he has a high paying job as a graphic artist with Microsoft.  A month later the whole family moves up and rents a house five minutes from ours.

 

Her adoptive parents are incredible people to whom I owe a debt that can not be paid.  They are my friends and

have given her haven and values that make her the great person she is.  She is a daughter her parents can be proud of.   Out of circumstance, family expands...and I am honored. Shortly after she made contact it happened that both sets of our parents were in Alaska fishing at the same time.  They hooked up and had a great encounter.  In 2015 she and my Mother took a trip to Paris together.