Falling Together.
Just an ordinary hotel room in an ordinary town in rural Ohio. As my mom and I began to nervously unpack our belongings we knew that any second there would be a knock on the door. That knock would lead to me opening the door to a sister, a sister that I never knew or met.
Three years ago I had just returned from a summer volunteer trip in Eastern Europe. My mom and I were on our way to Austin, Texas for a day just to catch up. During a break in conversation I could tell that she started to get nervous and began to tell me about a sister that she had found, my sister. Heather and I spoke for the first time on the phone a few days later, while most of the conversation was pieced together with tears I honestly didn’t know how to process it all. Heather and I are bonded together by a man that I have never met, my biological father. I was blessed to be raised by an amazing man that has been as much as a father to me as a father can be. Heather and I were separated for 22 years and you can imagine what happened when the knock on the door came to our hotel room. My mom and I caught each others eyes for a moment and she prompted me to open the door while she stood close behind. It seemed like it was in slow motion. I opened the door slowly, smiled, then without words or even a hello we fell into each other. It was something that I had never felt before. I finally had met this person that while we may have not shared the same experiences in life we shared allot of things. We began to notice that we had the same smile, that she liked scary movies just as much as I did, and she appreciated a nice glass of wine on a breezy night. We shared our childhoods, the good and the bad, love and loss that we had experienced, and times where she longed to meet me. Heather has known about me since she was 13 and found an old letter and picture of me. Something amazing happened in those five days that we shared together. We all healed a little bit and in different ways, and we both agreed that though my biological father may have not done much for either of us growing up he did give us one thing, each other.
