Processing…

In case you’re wondering what my brother (Sean) thinks of all of this – I ran this idea past him before creating the blog and he’s cool with it… and told me that I didn’t have to refer to him as S…

After I got off the phone with Sean Saturday night, I checked my email before going to bed. There was an email with a subject line reading “Welcome”. It was from my cousin Ro, Uncle Rick's son. He welcomed me to the family, told me a little bit about himself and his family, and attached some pictures. At that point, since I was more than a little overwhelmed and no longer capable of a coherent thought I decided to go to bed and write to him in the morning, but not before posting “I have a brother!” as my Facebook status. To say I slept like the dead that night would be an understatement.

I woke up early on Sunday morning and wrote to cousin Ro. I also checked Facebook – my friend Andrea had responded to my post with “huh?!” By way of explanation, I posted the happenings of the day before. Within a couple of hours most of my friends had commented with exclamations of surprise, happiness, and confusion. My friend Gisele summed it all up very succinctly – “Oh my. Wow. Holy sh*t. Jeekers. WTF? Yikes. Cool.” All of those thoughts were running through my head at about 1,000 miles a minute!

I discovered the night before, in speaking with Sean that not only do I have a brother and a horde of cousins, but I also have a sister-in-law (Mary) and a niece (Kayla). I received messages from both Mary and Kayla on Sunday. Mary was very sweet, acknowledging that she was sure that I was overwhelmed and welcoming me to the family. Kayla’s message was great, she talked about how excited she was to have another aunt, and then gave me the play-by-play on what took place at their house the night before as well as some detail on what she likes, what’s important to her, and what she does for fun – she’s a sweetheart!

Feeling more than a little off kilter, I called my cousins (Butch & Mike), who I have always thought of as my brothers (and still do). That was such a good decision; they helped me put things into perspective. When I was talking to Butch I mentioned that I was worried that I might not like this new family, or worse yet, they might not like me. He told me “don’t worry about it Mikki, they’re family, you don’t have to like each other.” Oddly enough, Mike has a friend who has had a similar experience a few months ago.