Meeting your own family from down the street

Adopted children often grow up wondering what their "real" families are like. In an essay in the New York Times magazine, a man describes meeting his birth parents. As it happened, after years of looking for his birth mother, it turned out that his biological mother and father had eventually married and ended up living not too far from where the man grew up with his adoptive parents.

He describes his sharing his experience with his wife this way: "I showed her all the photographs [from my birth mother], which she took and framed and added to the wall of our apartment devoted to family pictures. Even now, the pictures . . . cause me to do a double take as I walk by them, not so much wondering, Who are those people, as thinking, Oh, there you are."

An old family, which felt like a new family, now feels like an old family.

(Photo by Jeff Belmonte; used by permission.)