I've had a hard time trying to write about visitng my sister, Lori, in Tacoma, the weekend of October 5, without speaking too personally about her, or about my mom.

I left work early, at noon, that Friday. My husband took a long lunch so he could come home, pick me up, drop me off at the airport, and go back to work. Due to electrical storms we'd had here in Minneapolis earlier that morning, all Sun Country flights were delayed 90 minutes, all day. I tried to use my cell to call her and tell her my flight was delayed, but her voice mail had a message saying her voice mail box was full and could not accept new messages. So for the first time ever in my life…I sent her a text message telling her so! As I was finally being seated, and just before take off, I checked my cell phone one more time, and I had received a text reply from her saying she got it! Now I'm finally as technically proficient as a 12 year old !

She greeted me at the exit to baggage claim, and she was just as pretty as her pictures she's sent us. The ones that made me think, Sorry, she's too pretty to be related to me. But she has my mother's face and almost all her facial expressions, but bright blonde hair, instead of my mother's formerly chestnut colored, now grey, hair. We hugged and I told her how much she looked like our other sister, Dorothy. And you'd think we'd just be over-exicted, but instead it just "felt" like being greeted by a sister I'd always known. When we were exting the parking ramp she let me look through her purse for the temporarily lost parking ramp ticket for the cashier, when I offered, the way you do with someone you know well. I couldn't help noticing she and I both drive Saturn sedans, athough statistically speaking, that's probably not that much of a coincidence.

We drove to the Amtrak station to pick up her college age son, my nephew I'd never seen. I couldn't believe he'd take a week end off college in Portland to come to Tacoma just to see me, but he had. Then we went to her house in Tacoma, in a very near suburb to Tacoma and she made us linguini, which I loved. I'm a nervous traveler, so it's hard for me to eat the entire day before I fly, so I'm usually starved when I arrive.

That night, she showed me her childhod photo albums. I loved seeing that her parents started taking pictures the moment they laid eyes on her, in a hotel room, with a social worker, and had taken countless pictures of her over the years. And she was smiling in all of them! I brought her some pictures, too. I had only just selected them the night before. I had never noticed before, I have 2 pictures of my mother's birth mother…and none of her mother who raised her. In fact, I've only ever seen one childhood picture of my mother, and her mother was not in it.

The next day she offered to drive me to my long-deceased paternal grandmother's house. She really does now live just a few miles from where we used to visit my dad's parents.
We stopped in front of it and took pictures. My great-grandmother had lived in an apartment, in a subdivided house, directly across the street, so I got to see it, too. She even offered to drive to the cemetary where I know they're both buried, when her cell phone rang. It was my mom! She said dad agreed to drive her and Dorothy, my adult sister who still lives with them, tomorrow morning! Finally! My sister was finally going to meet her birth mother for the first time. I'd hoped for that, and had been getting annoyed that my dad who has the car was not offering to drive my legally blind mother 3 hours to meet. But we finally had a confirmation! Mom put our sister Dorothy on the phone, and both my sister and her son gasped. Dorothy sounded on the phone exactly like Lori's daughter, who would be joining us later that night!

I also cringed. It's hard for me to be around my parents. The very person my sister did a 10 year birth mother search for was part of a couple I have an aversion to and need prep time to emotionally distance myself a little. Lori doesn't need to know why, right now. I did, earlier that day, show her a news story about Annie Wrights boarding school for girls in Tacoma, and explain to her I had once , around the age of 11, completed my own application and my plan to escape to boarding school was only thwarted by my parents who refused to fill out the financial aid form, which needed to filled out based on their previous year's income tax return. So, she knows how I feel. But she was civil enough not to ask why I feel that way. It would just sound petty now. I'm 42 years old now, and should rise above it a little better than I do.

I had asked Lori to show me where she grew up, and luckly she still didn't live too far away from there! I got to see the house she grew up in, her church , her high school, the park she used to play in, her friends' houses. I got to see where her relatives' businesses used to be, and the fire house where so many of them were voluneers. I was just deeply grateful to see what a great family she grew up in, and what a close community they seemed to be.

That night, her 23 year old daughter joined us and we went out for pizza. When we got back my sister and I just talked for what must have been hours just about stuff! Our jobs and our kids. It really struck me that night, that her "laughing too hard" face is identical to mom's ! While we were out for pizza, she told me that mom told her that my brother called her "The Missing Link." He called her that because everytime someone asks him is birth order, he does the math again, answers "third" but silently second guesses it every time, as if he's sure he's missed someone.

I already told her in a previous email that when I first received an email, last April, from Dorothy, saying mom and dad had just informed her we had an older sister, placed for adoption when mom was a teen ager, I saved the email. I went to bed. I didn't tell my husband. I had him read it, himself, the next morning. I doubted my sanity, because I'd had missing sibling dreams so vividly, as a young adult, I even told mom's mom about it. The summer I lived with mom's mom, who raised her, in Fairbanks, Alaska, I told her about the dream I'd been having where I go back to visit and see an extra child there who I realize, in horror, that I do not recognize and can not name. Now I understand why grandma was so surprised when I told her my dream. But after having read the email from Dorothy, late at night, I wondered if I was just having a variation on that same dream.

The next morning at 10:00, my mom, dad and other sister Dorothy came. She finaly got to meet her birth mother. It was just a few days after mom's 64th birthday now. She was 19 when she had Lori, 44 years previously, in 1963. And again, on TV adoption reunions are so excessive and emotional, but ours was just so civil and quiet it was kind of surreal. We all got to finally ask my sister about the food allergy that had triggered her birth mother search in the first place. Apparently it includes the infamous red dye number 3, as well as some other ingrediants that could be in anything. She knows as soon as she puts something in her mouth, that it's contaminated, because her mouth will blister. And she once found out the hard way, that if she eats it anyway, she'll have anaphylactic shock and be unable to breathe, just like people with a peanut or bee sting allergy! Sadly for her, NONE OF US HAVE IT! So after all that search , although it did allow her to meet her birth mother, and know she has 7 biological half siblings in the world, we have no useful information to give her about her allergy.

In fact, I think she offered us more medical information than we have provided for her. Her college age son had a lot of behavior problems and compulsive behaviors, and has now, as an adult, taken himself to the doctor and informed everyone that in fact it is official, he does have Asperger's syndrome, and has chosen to accept the medications prescribed for it. They were all so surprised when I mentioned that one of my brothers has two young sons, both of whom were born with a birth defect in which they have no tendons in their thumbs, and were unable to grasp anything as infants and toddlers. They couldn't hold a crayon or a doorknob or a spoon! Only through a series of surgeries and physical therepy have they been able to grasp with one hand. Her college age son was born with a very similar condition! And he's an artist, like my own 14 year old daughter. He's already sold some paintings!

Lori also mentioned she always wished, as an adopted child, that she knew someone who looked just like her. And that we were her first experiences of that. But it was a similar experience for me, because although I met mom's birth mother twice, once when I was about 4 and again when I was 15, I'd never met any other biological relataives of my mom other than us kids. It was my second experience in my life to meet a biolgical relative of mom who was not also related to Dad. Lori's son had my brother John's dimples, and my mom's shape of mouth. Dan and I have the same, unusual flat, narrow fingernails, and I was able to tell him that came from Nana, mom's birth mother, becuase I had noticed during the last time I saw her, when I was 15, that she had them, too.

Apparently in her skin, eye, and hair color she looked so much like her extended family, that a lot of her relatives insisted that her parents must have adopted a relative, to cover for an unwed mother in the family and sometimes asked who it was! But her parents were always honest with her about her adoption and were even able to tell her the name of the school mom had attended and that she'd been a music student there at the time, so she always knew that much.

She also told me that one thing she didn't have as a child, that she'd always wanted was a sister. She only had an older brother. But now she knows she has 4 sisters and 3 brothers on our side of the family. And I told her in a previous email we won't just call her our "half" sister. People don't come in half. I was always disturbed as a child when people referred to me as " a quarter Jewish" or "an eighth Indian." I imagned a poster on the wall in the shape of a girl, similar to one of those posters of the outline of a cow, with the dotted lines defining the cuts of meat. It's dehumanizing to refer to someone in fractions.

We sat around her living room for 4 straight hours her, her new husband, her two college age kids, me, our mom, my dad, and our sister, Dorothy. Sometimes discussing her whole complicated birth mother search.

She had received a copy of the adoption social worker's notes , detailing her meeting with mom as a pregnant college student, and also her visits to the new adoptive family. They were supposed to have used a sharpie marker to remove my mother's name from the record…but they forgot one! And since it listed the name of her college, the year of my sister's birth, there, and my mother's unique first name, my sister listed those details on an adoption web site, and someone did the rest for her! She said she hadn't asked anyone to do that, and even felt that was too much invasion on mom's privacy. But it was done, she had a current name and address for mom. Having read the circumstances of her birth, but also having read that mom actually tried to keep her and had to be heavily persuaded by social services to place her with a family, she had a hard time knowing if mom would want to hear from her after all these years later or not. So she wrote mom a letter introducing herself, and inserted a self addressed reply card, and told her if you never want to hear from me again, put this card in the mail to me, I'll get it, and I'll never contact you again.

But mom did eventually email her, then leave her a voice mail. Which my sister still has not deleted out of her cell phone, and wants to save somehow as a wav file because she was so happy to get that voice mail. I did not know this, but until mom called her on her cell phone while we were driving on Saturday, they'd never spoken directly on the phone. They had only communicated via email.

I had always known that mom met her birth mother when she was 17 and on her way to college. She knew her birth mother's name and some had researched her apartment address, so mom just knocked on the door. I never knew until we all talked that Sunday, that her birth mother's first words were, "Oh my God, you have my old nose!" And then, "I wish you'd called first, I could have fixed my hair!" Later, Lori told me mom told her in an email, "I'm so glad you didn't do that!"

Lori and her new husband and my dad also had quite a lot to talk about, because they live so close to the neighborhood where he grew up and went to school. They were able to catch him up on all the local news. And they sometimes go see a local musician who my dad used to play bass with , as a teen ager! They know him! Like her father who raised her, before her, she is also a first responder. He had been a volunteer fire fighter and their lives revolved around the fire department. Now she's a paramedic. And her 23 year old daughter is following in that family tradition. She's an EMT now, studying to become a doctor or a paramedic. They're a pretty amazing family. I'm sorry to hear her father who raised her died years ago, when her kids were young. They can hardly remember him.

When it was time for me to go back to the airport, we took pictures with a variety of cameras including my cell phone camera, then Mom, Dad, and Dorothy all left, just as casually as they had arrived. Like visiting neighbors. I had hoped that mom and Lori meeting, while I was visiting, would break the ice, and they'd be more comfortable meeting together in the future. So I hope I'm right. That was only 2 weeks ago. Then Lori and her son drove me back to the airport. It was a long drive. And only then did we talk about some of the things we really hadn't been willing to talk about. She told me she could tell from the social worker notes that mom did not want to place her for adoption, and had even taken her home to college! But mom was so young, living on a college campus on scholarship, with no other means of any kind of support, that the whole thing just reads like a novel in which even she herself can only think "Please place this baby for adoption." We talked about my mother, her birth mother. And we talked about her mother who raised her. She told me mom told her how much she grieved at placing her for adoption, and for years dreamed of a crying baby she could not reach, or closing a school desk drawer with a crying baby in it. She told me mom told her how she grieved again when our 8 year old foster brother Marcus stayed with us for about 6 months, and then was adopted by a local family. I decided not to tell her now , how mom used to cry every time we had to give away each kitten from each litter of kittens we had, over the years, and the mother cat would bawl and go loudly meowing all over the house, for hours, for each lost kitten, in its turn.

Lori told me that mom told her that after she married and had me, a mere 17 months after Lori was born, she feared if she took her eyes off me for a second I would just mysteriously disappear. I told Lori how my 1 year younger sister, Crystal, and I used to ask our mother, when we were really little, if Crystal had a twin who was adopted away, because this question used to panic her and we enjoyed what we considered to be her excessive over-reaction. I told her again how relieved I was to see all her happy growing up pictures and see her home town and her neighborhood. And then I cried in the car. Everyone's grief just got to me. My mom's grief at having to place a baby for adoption, even though mom her self hated being adopted, my own grief at not getting to have this sister growing up, even though I have claimed to hate growing up in a family of 7 kids as I already did, and projected my own mom's hatred of being adopted onto Lori, just in case she hated being adopted, even though if that's the case she's never once mentioned it. And she reached over and patted my leg as if to comfort me even though she's the one who was adopted.

It wasn't until this car ride that she told me it wasn't just a coincidence that her mother, who raised her, played piano, and Lori had a lot of her discarded sheet music framed, in various locations around the house. According to the social worker notes, mom had been presented with 3 descriptions of potential adoptive families, and she selected the only one in which the mother was a musician. This lead to Lori participating in orchestra and jazz choir, as many of the other 7 of us did, growing up!

Back at the airport I called my husband . I told him, remember how you said, sure go to Washington, but don't come home all screwd up like you do. Well I'm screwed up. The stress of flying, which I hate, of seeing my parents, which I have a lot of anxiety over, and of all the adoption-reunion related excitement and mystery and grief had got to me. I had a pounding headache, and I don't get headaches. My back ached. I was still crying off and on. Slightly more than 48 hours after I landed in Tacoma, I was taking off again. Our plane had to circle the Minneapolis airport as we were still experiencing the same thunderstorms off and on that we were having before I left. My husband and children met me at the airport. My own 8 year old son's little arms were flapping like a little birdy trying to fly away, and he was making that rhythmic squeek noise he does, when he's excited. 6 hours later I had to get up and go to work again as if nothing had changed.