I like happy stories, especially happy stories that talk about reuniting adoptees and their biological parents. So let's talk about one!

In 2006, a Canadian adoptee received an award called "The Courage to Come Back" award. It was featured in the newspaper. Well, his biological Great-Grandmother saw his picture. And that's all it took, folks. One picture in the newspaper. Apparently the adoptee looks quite like his half-brother. And apparently Great-Grandma is observant! How many times have you skipped an entire page of the newspaper? Kudos to Great-Grandma for reading and taking a closer look!

It just gives me chills to read this:

"She contacted her granddaughter, my birth mother and says, "Go look in the paper." So my birth mother and her family pick up . . . and I was staring back at them, this picture of someone who looked like her son."

Can you imagine? My relinquished daughter and my older parented son have some striking similarities, especially when it comes to facial expressions. Sometimes he will make a face at me and I am caught so off guard in a pleasant way. Imagine how this birth mother felt, picking up a newspaper and looking into the face of one son and seeing another for the first (or, technically, second) time. Goodness!

This reunion has its beginnings in a random scratch he got on his leg at camp. He ended up losing his leg because of a flesh-eating disease. The irony is not lost on this birth mother. Losing a leg to find a birth family? I'm not an amputee. I don't want to be an amputee. But I have read the many words of birth parents comparing relinquishment to amputation. When the comparison is made, the words often used are, "It's like losing a piece of your body," considering the placed child did come forth from the mother's body. And here we see an adoptee who lost a limb and, after a progression of events, found his birth family. Just very interesting all the same!

I do like how he said that he and his birth mother are "taking it slow." Reunion can be tricky as we've read in countless birth mother, birth father and adoptee blogs. I wish all the family members (adoptive parents included) luck as they make their way into this new phase of their lives!

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For more on reunion, read these posts.

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Photo Credit.