This may seem like a simple thing, but apparently it’s not because no one seems to do it.  My son is having a birthday party this weekend and I sent out at least 15 invitations.  1 person RSVP’d.  1 out of 15.  I had to buy too much of everything just to make sure I have enough.  Please remember to RSVP for parties, especially kids birthday party.  It only takes a simple phone call.

I never knew my biological father.  Yeah, I knew his name and where he was from, but never knew him as a person.  Don’t feel bad for me, I had a great step-dad.  He’s so great that I simply think of him as my dad.  Anyway…  About June 2008, my sister and I found out that our bio-dad had died a couple of months earlier.  This made us sad because we didn’t have any of the answers we had been searching for for most of our adult lives.  We began searching for any of his family.  Our mom had told us he had a younger brother, so that’s where we started.  When you don’t have money for a PI, it can take a while, and it did.  Thanks to my sister never giving up, we found him less than a week ago.  He seems great, really nice and ready to help us with any questions we have about that side of the family.  The sad part is, he didn’t really know our father any better than we did.  They had a big age difference, plus our bio-dad was estranged from his family.  This was apparently due to drugs and alcohol.  No surprise there.  At least now I know where my tendency towards addiction comes from.  Even worse, my uncle didn’t even know his brother was dead until I called him.  Thankfully he’s been able to fill us in on a couple of things and has been a great help is getting us the information on his death.  At the age of 54, my father died of natural causes.  Heart failure, due to his stressful, drug and alcohol addled life.  He did talk about me and my sister during one of his few phone calls to my uncle in the years before he passed.  He regretted not knowing us, which I’m glad to hear.  We regret not getting to talk to him before he passed.  It’s not that we didn’t try, we just didn’t have enough information to go on.  You would think having a person’s SSN would be enough, but it’s not. 

I can’t really say that I lost a father, he was never there to say I had him in the first place.  I did however, gain an uncle.  A really great one from what I can tell so far.  So what if I’m 28 years old, that’s ok.  We’re able to talk more openly that if I was 16.  I hope this is the beginning of a really nice relationship.