When I met my younger son, 41, for the first time a few months ago, I wasn’t surprised to find myself dazed and elated, saying, “My life will never be the same.” What surprised me was why.
A short time earlier, this boy of my heart was inspired to explore the ancestry of his biological mother’s surname (the only biological surname he knew, since it was his at birth, changed immediately thereafter upon adoption). Just to see what would happen he Googled his complete birth name, first and last—and presto!—up popped on the very first page that name, his birth date and the name of the hospital where he was born.
Wait a minute, he thought, that’s me!
Clicking the related link, an on-line registry I’d joined that helps connect biological children and parents, he found my smiling face and the message that I was his original dad. Until that day, that moment, he’d known absolutely nothing about me. In fact, he told me later, he’d not given much thought to looking for his biological parents, not from any particular resistance (he presumed it would happen at some point), but because the love he received from his family left him with no void of identity aching to be filled.
Quickly, however, he found my website, where, among photos, biographical info and so on, he came upon several dozen of my essays—noodlings on my basic sense that the universe is a friendly place—including an essay about him, “The Power of Invisible People,” on the occasion of his 40th birthday.
Plus, he learned I’d authored a book of essays and stories, which he ordered from Amazon overnight. Thumbing through it, he paused at the acknowledgements, where he found himself listed among those who most conspicuously shape my life. “Projectile weeping,” he says, was his response. Soon after, he wrote the letter that began, “Hello Steve, I am your son….”
His name, I now know, is Craig. I’ve read his letter to any number of friends and family, and invariably each echoes the sentiment: “My God, he sounds just like you.”
The litany of common idiosyncrasies is enjoyably endless. The guy builds stone sculptures, for crying out loud. Then there are those connections of spirit that seem to exist beyond the paradigm of shared DNA. The part of me that, since birth, has experienced the universe as playful, loving and deep resides noticeably in him as well. As a kid in the early morning darkness after a snowstorm, Craig would surreptitiously take red food coloring and paint hearts on random front lawns in his town.
I came into this world with a bit of an attitude: I was going to experience God or die trying. (Of course, there are those who would say that I was also committed to being the person your mother warned you about.) By “experience,” I mean something way beyond thinking, studying, reading or talking about God, or even going to church: I mean realizing consciously, in every particle of my being, my Oneness with all of existence: my true identity. From that intention I have drawn to me endless beautiful, destructive, uplifting and nasty happenings that call me to be relentless in giving up my attachment to any belief, any choice, any anything that keeps me separate from Love. It’s messy at times, steep being the price of pretense, but there’s also fun. The more I’m dead certain about less and less; the more I get that every person, place or thing is a mirror showing me myself; the more I breathe through both joy and pain; the more I see everything as a manifestation of the Divine—the more I am open to what Paramahansa Yogananda calls the illimitable sky of wisdom.
The sun in this sky warms within me a passion to share what I’m learning with fellow travelers, beginning with my family of spirit and blood. It’s one reason I write essays, photograph my stone sculptures and draw with pen and ink as a form of journaling. No matter when Craig learned of my identity, even if he chose not meet me (or couldn’t because I was no longer walking the earth), I wished to provide him an opportunity to learn something about himself from my life, should he find that useful.
Now that he’s actually been born to me—smiling, bald and 220 pounds—the awe and reverence of a grand adventure marks the prospect of being with him in whatever ways lay before us.
And yet, and this is the surprising part, if, after receiving Craig’s letter, he and I were somehow prevented from enjoying any further contact—no phone calls, no long days in one another’s company, no emails, no sharing photos, no nothing—my heart would still be singing.
His letter satisfied a hunger that I hadn’t acknowledged I’d been living with all these years, a hunger that had always been central to my intentions for him: that he be making his way surrounded by love, and thriving in that love. In the context of his written words that prompted me to say to my wife on the day I received them, “He’s such a beautiful boy,” two sentences leapt out: “I was raised…by the most loving family a boy could ever want,” and “I am blessed with a…circle of friends who never miss an opportunity to love me shamelessly.”
Among Craig’s earliest memories is seeing his parents, Wilma and Max, standing in his bedroom doorway, watching him sleep. Speechless with gratitude, I shouldn’t wonder. It’s certainly my primary feeling—gratitude for the privilege of meeting this boy of my heart, but mostly gratitude for the privilege of learning that his soul has been well-tended.
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