Blink and life turns all topsy-turvy. With work (school? whatever you call grad school when you're not in classes), traveling, ski conditioning, etc. the last few weeks have just gotten away from me. Busy is good, but I'm looking forward to next week when I get a bit of a breather. San Francisco, here I come.
Since I grew up in the Bay Area I have a very strong love-hate relationship with CA/The Bay. There's a ton of places I love, and my family is there, but it's also a pretty nasty place, and lacks big mountains but makes up for it with traffic and smog. Yummy. I've only been back a few times since I moved away in 2004, and last year I only got to go back for about 4 days for my cousin's wedding. This time I get 5 whole days there; it's going to be busy but be completely awesome. 'So you're going on vacation, big whoop,' you might think. This trip is so much more than that; let me explain.
My mom was born in Vicenza, Italy, to an Austrian mother and a father of unknown decent. She was adopted when she was 2 from a orphanage in Salzburg, Austria along with her half sister (though you'd never guess it since they were raised together). I am so lucky to have an aunt like Debbie Flanagan, and I've got an amazing uncle and two awesome cousins that I grew up with in CA out of the deal too. That was pretty much the extent of my family growing up; my dad has a brother and sister-in-law back in FL, but we didn't see them much. Small families are awesome though.
I spent a good part of my childhood watching my mom search for her birth mother. It was a difficult search; the internet wasn't what it is now and she had to spend some serious hours researching and calling Europe to try to find info. Finally, she managed to track down the information she needed. Her birth mother was alive and living in Minneapolis with her three children. She wanted nothing to do with my mom and was clearly terrified my mom would try to contact her half-siblings and spill the dirty little details of their mom's youth. That was a blow to my mom, but she got the answers she needed and that was good enough for then. She also discovered that her birth mother had another 4 kids floating around out there; 4 more kids that had been put up for adoption.
In the winter of 2007 I was sitting in my dorm room, pretending to do work and I got a call from home (this is less impressive since my dorm was 15 minutes from home, but still). "I just got a call from my brother," was my mom's opening line. This was super confusing to me, since I didn't think my aunt had undergone sex-change surgery and the mother/sibling-search had ended years earlier. Turns out she wasn't the only one looking; Ritschi was her younger brother who had begun the same search in Austria. Turns out one of the people he called was one of the women my mom had talked to in great detail to find out about her mother. In a matter of minutes our family almost doubled. I had a new uncle (my mom a new brother), two new cousins, and a new aunt. It's still kind of weird. We got to meet all of the family save the older daughter the following summer when they all got on a plane for the first time in their lives and headed stateside.
This trip to CA is when I finally get to meet my last cousin, and let me tell you it's going to be epic. It's weird how this girl, who I've never met before and have barely communicated with, is so very much a part of my family. It's probably because I had such a small one growing up, and because it has made my mom so incredibly happy to have more of a family of her own, but the Wallner's of Ibm, Austria are my family.
So that's why this trip is more than a vacation; kinda cool, huh?
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