January 18th - and I'm still processing...

Thankfully these revelations took place during a long weekend, giving me some time to adjust. Happily Monday was a holiday. My husband Dave had to go to work. This left me with a whole day to do nothing but try to wrap my head around everything (some might call this navel gazing).

Sometime around 10:00 a.m. the phone rang. The caller was my (new to me) cousin C. She is Uncle Rick’s daughter and lives in Georgia. Nice call… we chatted for a little while before she had to go to work. She told me about herself and her family. She was involved in the search with her dad while she was a cop. I’m still kind of blown away at Uncle Rick’s tenacity… never giving up the search as the years rolled by.

Later in the day, my imagination got the better of me. I started thinking about my family – the one that I have known and loved my entire life, and Dave’s family who I have known and loved for the last 16 years and I got a little irritated. I was thinking: “hey – I’ve got a perfectly good family. I don’t need this. I’ve managed pretty well for the last 47 years – what am I supposed to do with this turn of events?”

I’m a fairly methodical person. I like to know what’s going on – all the time. The more I thought about my “new” family the more agitated I became. By the time Dave got home that night I was in a complete lather! At one point I was standing in the kitchen, hands on my hips, saying – “Really Dave, I don’t need this. I have a perfectly good family right here. Now I have a bunch of strangers that I have to deal with – what if I don’t like them, what if they don’t like me, what if…” – and my wonderful husband walked up to me, put his hands on either side of my face and told me to take a couple of deep breaths and that everything would be okay.

As usual, Dave was right…