The Unexpected

Fast forward to 2001.  I have graduated from college and moved back home.  I was working full-time.  All of the sudden my dad ends up in emergency heart surgery.  Always a fast healer, he bounced back fairly quickly.  I've always heard that being faced with your own mortality can change your life, but I was hoping he'd quite smoking, eat healthier, etc.  I had no idea his surgery would change his MIND.  One day, out of the blue and very matter of factly, he says "I'm going to find my brothers and sister."  Well, okay dad.  Now where to start?  I was excited and nervous and couldn't begin to imagine how he was feeling.

He decided to start where he came from - Eagle Grove, Iowa.  So he and my mother drove there, several hours from Washington.  They went to the library and found yearbook pictures of Wilbur and Ernie, the oldest of the seven children.  They found my grandfather's obituary.  They thought they found a yearbook photo of him (the first of many false leads).  They went to the water department and inquired about the family.  Not a highly respected family, they said, and older locals certainly remember Kathryn losing custody of her kids.  Oh, and by the way, here's your mother's address, they say.  Oh, and also by the way, she had five children with her second husband.  Holy s _ _ _.  At some point, maybe after visiting my grandfather's grave, the realization is made that my grandfather was twenty-four years older than my grandmother.  Again, holy s _ _ _.  Over the years, I have learned that we are just a "holy s _ _ _ " kind of family.  So apparently (I wasn't there), my dad and mom drive by my grandmother's house and, you got it, holy s _ _ _, and not in a good way.  My dad calls home to tell me my grandmother is alive and I am flooded with excitement, albeit short-lived.  She is apparently not someone we will be re-uniting with.  As I wallow in my own sense of disappointment, I am so sad for my dad.  On that trip, my dad also did some snooping around courthouses.  He was able to find his brother's original birth certificate.  Even though it had been "sealed" by the courts, it had only been "sealed" in the courthouse book by stapling a piece of paper over the top.

And so they came home with some surprises but not a lot more.  At some point in this whole process, although I have definitely lost track of the order of events in the last fifteen or so years, we talked to the DMV, looking for one of my dad's brothers and event tracked down the office in Des Moines where the records from the orphanage are housed.  That phone call to Des Moines began our rivalry with Iowa Adoption Law.