I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do, but clearly, in my case the answer was freak-out. Tuesday was the first day back to work after the weekend of revelations. To say that my co-workers wanted to talk about the events of the weekend would be an understatement. To say that I was a focused, productive worker that Tuesday would be an overstatement. I was completely distracted and it got worse as the day wore on.
Sean went through the same experience I've been having when Uncle Rick found him 19 years ago. He was just sixteen… in retrospect that's probably a good thing, I think that at 16 you adapt a bit more easily than at 47. So I sent the following email to Sean…
“…I'm not being stand-offish... but my head is still spinning a little bit... by that I mean that in the back of my head I've always known that I had a brother out there, but I guess that when you know something like that (from when you were a little kid), it's kind of like knowing (as a little kid) that there is a Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny... and now I feel like I just found out the Easter Bunny is real. It's all good, I'm just processing...
You're my brother and there's so much stuff that I don't know about you... when is your birthday, how old were you when you met Mary, what do you do for fun, what was your childhood like, what do you guys do for vacations, what's your sense of humor like, are we going to like each other, is it going to be weird, will we have anything in common - my mind is racing at about 1,000 miles a minute and has been since Saturday night.
Additionally, this kind of redefines my life a little... I've always thought of myself as an only child, well that's certainly changed... I've always thought I had a moderately sized family; wrong again, it's huge. It's all stuff like that... by now you’ve probably figured out that I'm also a little neurotic (but you would have discovered eventually anyway).
Ok, so that was a lot to throw at you... I hope you don't think I'm a total headcase now…”
To his credit, having been through the same experience at 16, Sean wasn’t horrified by my message at all. He tried to write back but he prefers communicating via phone… he tells me that email has gotten him into trouble before. So he called me Tuesday night and we had SUCH a great talk. We were on the phone for 2 hours. He has a great sense of humor, we have a lot of similar personality traits, and again, it is just so easy to talk to him… it’s really kind of spooky…
Sean and I are extraordinarily lucky to have been presented with this opportunity after all these years...
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