One day on the plane to San Jose the passenger next to me, a woman about my age, struck up a conversation which inevitably led to her politely asking where I was going. I told her I was going to visit my father, and then told her the story of how I found him. She confided that she also had never known her father and had often thought about finding him.

“Maybe he’s rich and would leave me a big inheritance,” she said.

Wow, is she optimistic! I thought.

“Or maybe he’s a crackhead who wants to sleep on your couch,” I bluntly replied.

Her face fell.

“Oh, I never thought of that.”

I was amazed. She never thought of that?!

I admit I had my share of daydreams about my father, but I had just as many fears as fantasies. I was prepared for the heartache this discovery might bring.  Or so I thought.

The truth is that no one is ever really prepared for what they find. The path since finding my father has been laden with both goldmines and landmines. I never saw some of it coming, but interestingly, some people did.

A few days after I sent out an email to my friends and family announcing that I had found my father, I received a reply from a good friend who confided to me that his ex-wife had had a similar experience during the time that they were still married. Her father turned out to be a wild biker nicknamed something like “Wild Dog” or “Butch”. She immediately fell in love with him and his family. In the end she left her husband and her religion for them.

My friend revealed this to me as a gentle warning, though I gave it little thought at the time. Such an extreme case is surely rare, I thought. I showed the message to Cameron and then went to bed, unconcerned.

The next day I went to visit my friend Desiree, who lives in Murrieta. I hadn’t yet printed the pictures from meeting my new family the week before, so I took the laptop which had the pictures on it from the desk in the diningroom. I was gone all day, and I was on the freeway trying to beat Cameron back home when he called. 

He was panicky. He had come home early from work and, finding me and the laptop gone, instantly remembered the ominous email and jumped to the conclusion that I had left him for my new wonderful dad!

I was dumbfounded. He had seemed totally fine up until that moment. Was he really that insecure?

Time and again my friends and family had asked me, “How is Cameron doing with all this?” and I would be surprised that there was such concern. Cameron was thrilled for me, of course. He said he felt like his best friend just won the lottery. How else would he react? I was confused that others had so little faith in him. Still, the warnings came from every direction. Friends and family continued to advise me to pay extra attention to my husband, that my having a new man in my life would be difficult for him to adjust to. I didn’t understand why and at first found these warnings ridiculous. Having a father is like having a nose; why would Cameron begrudge me one? He insisted he was not jealous of my dad. He didn’t complain about me being on the phone with my dad everyday and checking my email constantly to see if he had written. He let me turn the hallway family picture wall into practically a shrine to my dad. He waited patiently while the laundry piled up and the refrigerator remained empty. He was giving me time to adjust, and I took all the slack he gave me.

At first the issues between us starting appearing slowly. When Cameron admitted that it was difficult for him to see another man hold my hand or put his arms around me, I tried to reason with him.

“He’s not ‘another man,’” I told him. “He’s my dad.”

It quickly became a source of concern that my father and I had so much in common. We were crazy about eachother. Love is blind, of course, and my new dad seemed like the perfect man to me. How could he not? He’s just like me!

I had been married for seventeen years, and naturally the days of thinking my husband was perfect ended long ago. Oh, he was faithful and loyal; I wasn’t stupid enough to think that was something to sneeze at in this treacherous world in which at least 50% of men cheat on their wives. Cameron tells me he loves me constantly and that I am ‘the woman of his dreams’. He is patient, gentle and kind to me. We share the same faith. He takes good care of me financially, gives me expensive gifts, pays off my credit cards monthly without saying a word. But it appeared even Cameron couldn’t compete with the love I had found with Bob Reid.

Still, as ecstatic as I was with finding my father, it wasn’t all joy and fun. The initial shock was so intense that for the first two weeks I would wake up at 3:30 in the morning shaking and worrying that he was not real. I was having a hard time getting out of bed. I isolated myself from my friends. I began to hate my dog. 

My head was reeling, and a deep confusion had set in about my feelings for my husband. The love we had built over the years was real, but there is nothing like the euphoria of that heady concoction of legal smack called New Love (see my page Addicted to Love). Suddenly the idea of a woman leaving her husband for her newfound father did not seem so strange to me. And Cameron knew it.

We were both terrified. I had worked hard at my marriage and was proud that we were still together. After weathering many storms, I thought nothing could tear us apart. Who would have thought that if I fell for another man, it would be my own father?

Not that there was anything sexual between me and my dad. For me what was so irresistible was the opportunity to get what I had missed in my childhood: the love and affection of my real father, the idea that I could be someone’s little girl again, to be shown the ropes in the music world, to be an adored only child, to build my self-esteem, to be encouraged to reach my full potential and to have someone cheering me on. For him it was the opportunity to be a father, an opportunity he felt he had missed out on. We had a mutual need for eachother, and it quickly became apparent that finding a place for my husband in all this was going to be more difficult than I could have ever imagined.

One family member had warned, “Don’t make any decisions for the next six months to a year. I know you are in the honeymoon stage right now, but that will wear off, and you don’t want to do anything you will regret.”

I was grateful for those words and recognized my need for further advice. I began seeing a psychologist. 

“I am not the kind of psychologist who is going to tell you to do what feels good and just suffer the consequences,” he began. “I am the kind who is going to tell you to do the right thing. Some people want me to tell them what they want to hear. I’m not going to do that.”

This was exactly what I needed. I was nervous about going to therapy in the first place. I hadn’t had good experiences with it and was convinced that all it did was make you focus on your problems. I had often callously remarked that the most screwed-up people I knew were the ones who have had the most therapy. And the number of them who have left their mates after seeking a therapist’s advice is disturbing. I was afraid in my condition that bad advice could push me over the edge into doing something completely insane. So I promised myself that if I got any bad vibes at all on the first visit, I would never go back. 

On the contrary, the doctor I found told me that keeping marriages together was his first priority. I was relieved. That was what I wanted to hear. I was confused about my feelings, but one thing was perfectly clear: I did not want to lose my marriage.

When I got home that night from Murrieta, Cameron and I did some serious heart-to-heart. My relationship with my dad was suddenly shining light on the flaws in my marriage. A marriage is often compared to a house, one that needs regular maintenance and occasional remodeling. On examining ours closely we agreed that our ‘house’ needed a new roof, but instead of replacing it, we had long been patching it with duct tape and bubble gum. Suddenly the leaks were becoming a downpour. We sat on the floor together that night and poured out our hearts to eachother, and the repairs got underway. We are still working hard at it, and our efforts are paying off. My father ended up being the catalyst for some much needed change.

In the meantime the relationship between me and my dad has begun to normalize. I am much more realistic now about his human-ness, which is a really nice way of saying that sometimes he ticks me off. We had our first fight about three months after meeting. It was traumatic for me, and I frantically left message after message on his answering machine trying to make peace. Unaware that he was out of town, I was sure he was giving me the silent treatment. By the time he returned home three days later, his machine was full of messages from me, panicked and tear-stricken. I guess they sounded pretty crazy, judging by the way he responded as if I really was crazy! So we had another fight about that! But we made up, of course, and now when we argue I am much less freaked out by the whole experience. That’s what families do. We fight.

Which, by the way, is what I’ve been doing with some other family members as well. 

“When did you decide you hated our family?” one of my siblings demanded to know.

Ouch! Who knew that my search would be taken as a personal rejection of the family I grew up with? Or that my mom would be humiliated by my outspokenness about her mistakes? Or that my affection would be torn between my husband and father? This experience has been more expensive emotionally than anyone could have guessed.

How would the younger me have handled these difficulties? I was only twenty-one when I first starting looking for Bob Reid. I was newly married and already depressed. My dad Neil was dying. I shudder to think how the bomb of finding Bob back then could have blown away my whole world. 

Now, if my experience with finding my father is the best case scenario, imagine what a bad experience would be like! And for anyone considering looking for their long-lost parent, it is important to envision the worst-case scenario rather than the best. The reality will be somewhere in between. 

Few search stories end happily. My therapist says most people need six months of therapy to work through the finding of a parent.  It is an experience that not only rocks the boat could darn well sink it. Some people have discovered that their biological parents had already passed away when they found them, others found out their parents were drug addicts, prostitutes or mentally ill. Or worst of all, the parent simply wanted nothing to do with them. 

I, on the other hand, found the father I always wanted. He might not leave me a big inheritance, but he is a wonderful person. He doesn’t have a jealous wife to contend with. He was overjoyed to be found. My husband is patient and willing to deal with me and my issues. My mom is understanding and forgiving. I was one of the fortunate ones; with a little more therapy and antidepressants I should be good as new in no time.

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