They were strangers to Jenn, so as she prepared for her first in-person meeting with her newly found brother and two sisters, her anxiety rose.
“Of course, I was nervous,” said Jenn, a 46-year-old who works in a New York real estate office. “I went over everything that can go wrong, you know, especially because of what happened when I reached out to my birth mother.”
That was in 2019. The state of New York had just opened adoption records. Jenn found the identity of her birth mother, carefully crafted a letter to her, and included photos of herself as a child and another one of her as an adult. Jenn didn’t want anything from her birth mother; she just wanted to connect. Instead of an embrace, she got the kind of response many adoptees fear the most.
“She doesn’t want to have anything to do with me,” Jenn said.
‘You Have Daddy’s Eyes’
So, five years later, after connecting through 23andMe to three half-siblings on her birth father’s side, Jenn was all butterflies. Then she walked into the pizza parlor where she’d be meeting Joe, Lisa, and Mechele. She heard Lisa say, “Welcome baby sister,” and she then got her first group hug.
“Sometimes when you meet someone for the first time, you’re nervous and you hold something of yourself back,” Jenn said. “There was none of that. It’s crazy how easily we got along.”
At one point, one of her siblings said, “You have daddy’s eyes.”
One minute, they were four strangers meeting for the first time; the next, they were family.
Creating Family Memories
That was on January 26th, 2024, the 30th anniversary of their father’s death. Their bonds with each other have only grown since then, including a bigger family reunion in August and plans to gather again for the holidays this year.
“I am looking forward to creating memories with my family and learning more and more about our father,” said Jenn. “23andMe was a blessing, and we are so very grateful for the opportunity to make our family complete.”
Getting to the point where she could sit at this much, much bigger family table this holiday season wasn’t easy. It was 46 years in the making.
Jenn, and her brother, were adopted from different families, but they always felt lucky to have a mom that loved them unconditionally.
“When I say, ‘my mom,’ I mean the woman who raised me,” Jenn said. “She is my mother.”
That’s never going to change.
Losing Mom
When, as young kids, she and her brother learned that they’d been adopted, they didn’t tell their mom.
“I couldn’t even think about looking for (my birth parents) while she was here because it would have broken her,” Jenn said. “I would not do that.”
For Jenn, being adopted felt special. She believed that unlike other kids who just get the parents they’re born to, she and her brother had been chosen by their parents, and they won the parent lottery with their mom.
“She was my world,” Jenn said, her voice filled with emotion.
When their mom died in 1997, Jenn was devastated. She was 19.
It would be a long time before she’d start searching for where she came from and who her birth parents might have been. It wasn’t so much to make a connection but more about trying to understand herself and her story.
“I wanted to know where I came from and who I was,” she said.
She loved her mom and loves her brother, but she also felt different.
“Growing up, my mom was very quiet, very calm, cool, and collected,” Jenn said. “My brother is also like that, and here I come along and I’m loud, I’m fresh. I’m the person at the party saying ‘let’s dance.’ I wanted to know why I was that way.”
Taking a Chance at Finding Family
Her first quest in 2019 started with getting ahold of her adoption records in New York and ended in rejection. She thought that was the end to her search for family.
“I closed the book on all that,” she said.
In 2017 she used 23andMe, but it wasn’t to find her family. She wanted to learn more about her ethnicity. She learned she was mostly British and Irish and had some German ancestry. She had some very distant cousins that popped up, but she didn’t really think about family connections. Then she got an email in December of 2023 notifying her that a relative had messaged her on 23andMe.
It was a message from Joe.
She scrolled down, saw his photo and that he was predicted to be a half-brother.
“I dropped my phone,” she said.
Meeting for the First Time
They feverishly began exchanging messages. Joe was as eager as she was to learn more. He eventually asked if he could loop in his sisters. Jenn thought, “Wait, I have sisters.” Then using Facebook, she was able to put more faces to names.
Along with Joe, there was Mechele and Lisa. They all had questions for her as well. Their dad had divorced from their mom in the early 1970s, and afterward he dated for a while. That’s when Jenn had been conceived, but the three siblings believe their father didn’t know anything about Jenn.
“He had no idea about me,” Jenn said. “Everyone swears that if he knew, he one hundred percent would have looked for me, would have found me, and would have been a part of my life.”
But he never got that chance, and then he died of a heart attack in 1994.
Nature Versus Nurture
Now Jenn is learning about her birth father from her siblings. She’s learning that they all share the same kind of boisterous personality as she does, and odd little things.
“Okay. So here’s one thing that happened when,” Jenn said offering one example. “We took a picture, all four of us for the first time and we’re all joking and just kind of sitting there living in the moment. And my sister Mechele goes, ‘Put a leg up!’”
She kicked her leg up and her sister grabbed it for the photo.
“I stopped for a second and she said, ‘Wait, what happened?’” Jenn said. “They all stopped and looked at me.”
That’s something she’s always doing for photos.
“I looked over at my boyfriend and we’ve been together for 20 years, and he just shook his head, (because) I do that all the time. I say, ‘Put a leg up!’ and you throw a leg up in the picture.”
It’s such an odd thing to imagine that could be something genetically shared, but it was also so distinctive like something she has always done.
“I was baffled, it’s so weird, but cool, in a cool way,” Jenn said.
Your People
As she gets closer to visiting again with her newfound family for the holidays, Jenn also marvels at how fortunate she has been.
“It’s beautiful, this is my family, and I finally get like, I get it all. I get sisters. I get an extra brother. I don’t know how it was so perfect or how I’m so lucky. But I am. I’m the luckiest person in the world.”
There is no question that they are going to stay in each other’s lives. The family is just bigger now.
Her brother, who she was raised with, saw it too.
“He’s my brother. We’re not blood related, but we were raised together. And he said to me when he saw the photos of that first meeting, he said, ‘Jennifer, those are your people.’”
