The time I never thought would come is here.....

Hello all

I spent my Thursday evening with my half-sister Sarah and it resulted in me having one of the biggest internal debates of my life.

For those of you that don't know, I am adopted and have been from just a few weeks old. I was adopted from the Wood family to be a member of the Jackson family. Just under two years later and Samantha was born, later renamed Sarah when she was adopted out to the Barradell family. I had always known I was adopted but never really gave it a second thought before Sarah got in contact with me, basically introducing herself and we met up.

Skip forward 15 years, I'm now 27 and she's 25 but our relationship has never been particularly strong. It's never really felt like we're brother and sister because despite looking reasonably similar, we don't have that much in common. She's always felt more like a friend rather than family, and the one BIG difference between us is our attitude towards the fact we were adopted.

As I said earlier, I've never really given it that much thought. The only times it's ever more than a fleeting thought  is when I see Sarah, but other than that it rarely crosses me mind. Sarah on the other hand has always been curious and found myself 15 years ago and now our mother, Janice. I've known for a while that Sarah and Janice knew each other and that they see each other on a regular basis, but when I saw Sarah earlier she mentioned that Janice has written a letter to get in contact with me and it's bought up something which I never thought would happen, a turning point.

I could go one of two ways, I could just go with it, see what the letter says and then reply and then take it from there whether I would want to build a relationship with her, or I could just completely ignore it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not angry or anything that I was put up for adoption, I have no feelings of hate or anything towards Janice, far from it, but I've always said that I have no interest in really getting in contact with her, BUT I never expected to get anything from her.

I am really conflicted with what I want to do. I think it would be harsh not to write a letter in return, so either way I'm going to do that, but do I want to build a relationship with her? Do I want to meet her? Do I want to get to know her? These are questions that all of a sudden seem very real and right at this moment I don't know what I want to do. My gut instinct tells me that the answer to all of those questions is no, do I ignore close on 28 years of having a certain feeling only to then flip over at the first sign of it becoming real?

In a year where a lot of things are changing for me and I have a lot of hard choices to make, this could easily be the most difficult decision of them all.