What a Trippy Morning.

Something you may or may not know (depending on whether I've mentioned it to you, obviously) is that I have a half-sister in Australia. I have known this since I was about 12, when my mom told me. Six months later, my dad also told me. The story is, my dad had a prior marriage, before meeting my mom, and had been married to an Englishwoman in London. They had a daughter. My sketchy knowledge of what happened is that her family was Australian, and she wanted to return to Australia, but my dad didn't want to move, and they did, and so that was that.

From time to time I've thought about trying to find my half-sister, and have even done a little internet research (fruitless) and posted something on an internet bulletin board at one point. But it's hard to make that a priority when you have already reached an adult life, and there hasn't ever been a sister in it (though mine was fraught--fraught, I tell you--with no less than five stepsisters, none of whom I ever lived with for a very long period of time). Plus, I told myself repeatedly, I needed to just bug my dad about it, because he never discouraged me from the idea of contacting her someday. He just never quite got around to giving me any actual concrete information, and I never quite got around to pinning him down about it. I think about it fairly often, but thought is not action.

Well, I received an e-mail this morning from the Salvation Army Family Tracing Service in Brisbane, Australia, notifying me that my sister is trying to track down my dad. Our dad. I wrote back as soon as I got it, saying that I would pass on the message and encourage him to respond, and asking the Salvation Army person to please give her my contact information. I just heard back again, and they are going to give her my information and she plans to e-mail me. I honestly have been in kind of a fog all day, thinking about all this.

Obviously this means that he hasn't been in touch with her, which I suspected, but it seems like it's been a long time. There's a thirteen-year age difference between me and my half-sister. I also wondered, why now? Not that there would ever be a particular time to do these things, but it seemed so out-of-the-blue. Until I thought about how there was just a humongous earthquake in Pakistan and India, and if she hasn't been in touch with him, she may well be worried that he might be back in Pakistan. Then it all made a bit more sense, though perhaps I'm reading into it now. She wouldn't necessarily know a thing about anything that happened to him since their family split up. (My dad can be close-mouthed about potentially awkward subjects.)

So that was my excitement for the day.