Meeting my dad for the first time.

14 April. Well I have had the mastectomy op and the axillaries nodes removal op in November and December of last year. I have finished chemo which I have had all of this year and had a blood test yesterday so oncology can put me on Tamoxifen for the next two years starting next week. That’s enough about cancer.

I have a new thing happening. This Sunday I am going to go and meet my biological father whom I have never met! I am 53 years old, and he is 76.

Hubby and I are planning to travel on Saturday the 5 hours down the Qld coast and get those km’s out of the way and stay in our Lowood house for sale overnight. We really need to stay in the house as with my chemo happening the last three months, we are truly breaching our house insurance guidelines which say the house needs to be inhabited at least one day a month, oops! We will travel the other 2.5 hours into NSW to meet dad on Sunday and then do the long trip back to home on the Fraser coast on Sunday night.

How come I am 53 years old and never met my father you may well ask? Well I was 25yrs old and estranged from my mother when she tracked me down and told me that while she was my mother, my father who had died of cancer when I was 13yrs old was my adopted father. She had never put my real fathers name on the birth certificate but she told me his name which at that time turned out to be the wrong middle name and even though I searched for him with phone calls trying every person with that same first and last name, I was never able to find him.

The reason for this, I have now found out was that he was in the army but worked overseas for ASIO and his files were sealed. His mother and sister were told he was deceased and for 4 years they thought he was lost to them until he returned to Australia and knocked on his mother and sisters door very much alive and well, but that’s another story.

He had tried to find me all my life but with adoption laws and his name not being originally on the birth certificate it was a hopeless search. My grandmother had also moved house from the address he had known my mother from and even if he had found her, she wasn’t about to reveal that my mother had married and started a respectable family of her own; (I have a younger half sister and half brother). Even dads brother contacted my grandmother before she moved house and was turned away so I have now been told. 

The years passed and I tried with the new era of internet to find my dad that way but Google searches never revealed anything about my dad. Then I was diagnosed with breast cancer in October, 2015 and things took a turn for the better in my search for dad.

I was terribly worried breast cancer might be in our family lines but with no cancer on my mothers side at all, I asked mum what about my biological fathers genes? She finally remembered his correct first, middle and surname and I Google searched again. It came up with a hereditary family tree with dads name, his wife’s name (he was a married man when I was conceived and later divorced his wife) and two children, a boy and a girl. I told mum about it and she confirmed the wife’s name was the same name in the family tree online.

Dad actually existed! Up until then I thought Mum had been telling me Porkie pies all these years as none of her family siblings or my grandmother, who must have half raised me to 4 years old before mum married, has ever said one word about mum being a single mother in my early life. I also tried from the names on the family tree I had found, Googling dads wife’s name, and the two children’s names. The only link I found was with one of the children, the daughter who linked to Face book. I thought it was probably a bit of a wild goose chase as she would have surely changed her maiden name to a married one as she was 53 years old like me on the family tree link but I thought what the hell, I would go onto Face book and private message her and see if her dad was my dad too.

Imagine my surprise when she replied, yes Brenda, we have all been looking for you for years! If that wasn’t a surprise enough, she said she and her two children from her deceased partner lived with her mum, dads ex wife, just one street away from dad in NSW in the exact same town! She said dad had testicular cancer which had also turned into prostate cancer and he had beaten both of those years ago but he had just been diagnosed with bone cancer as well.

My new found half sis and I chatted more on face book and linked our conversation with yet another half sister on face book as dad had remarried but she had lost her mother just one ago before to diabetes. I am not sure if dad had divorced her mother or not but apparently there was another half brother of mine by yet another mother whom dad hadn’t married. So I have two new half brothers and two half sisters. My goodness my family tree is growing fast. I have numerous nieces and nephews I never knew about either.

My half sister gave me dad’s details and so began an odd sort of phone call, hello, I am Brenda, your daughter? Dad knew me straight off and he was absolutely delighted I had called him. He told me of some of his life and I told him some of mine but because he was quite tired from chemo I wrote him a letter of my life’s story which he has since told me he has nearly read the print off of and laughed and cried every time he has picked it up. We’ve kept in contact via phone throughout our cancer treatments and now my chemo is finished I have been bursting to get well enough to travel and meet him.

This weekend is the meeting. He is on the last weekend of one of his monthly chemo doses and he doesn’t know how long they will keep happening. His next dose is on next Tuesday so he is as well as he is ever going to get at this stage. We’re going to meet him, wish us luck!

Photo of my dad, from my new sister.