My mother was adopted as an infant. About twenty years ago, my mother started looking for her birth parents. I didn't know she was looking for them. She told my brother, and he told me.
Fast forward twenty years, there are now companies like ancestry.com where you can mail them a saliva sample, and they will run a test on your DNA to find where you are from and connect you with long-lost relatives.
This is fine for people who know who they are related to, but it is kind of scary when half of my family tree will be populated people I don't know. Since the day I was born, my maternal grandfather was Joseph Conti, and my maternal grandmother was Anne Liberti Conti. I have cousins and aunts who I have known forever who will not appear on this genetic and electronic family tree.
I am not sure I am ready for this, but my dad wants to do this for my mom before she dies of Alzheimer's. She doesn't have the capability to spit into a cup now. Her adoptive parents are dead, so there is no fear of offending them.
But what does this new service do to people who might not have known they were adopted, or for women who perhaps gave up a child for adoption years ago and now have another family? I suppose they could choose not to spit in the cup, but their sister or daughter might, and those connections might appear.
Will I want to meet these new members of my family tree? Would they want to meet me?
This blog is about the little and big thoughts that pop into my head. I once read that when Flannery O'Connor walked into a bookstore, she would want to edit her published works with a red pen. In the digital world, we have the luxury of tweaking things up after we've hit the publish button. I can be a perfectionist/procrastinator, where waiting for the ideal means little gets done. Here I will share what is not--and likely will never be--perfect.
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