This week has been pretty huge for me.

My birth mother has come to stay with me and KT. She arrived in NZ a month ago – I wrote about it here – and has been spending time catching up with her old friends and reconnecting with my birth father.

Last Sunday represented the first time in my entire life that I have been in the same room as my mother and my father. It was a little surreal.

My kids got to meet their biological grandmother for the first time in their lives on Tuesday. After the initial shyness they connected. My mother (76) loves technology and gaming and has a Steam membership, as does Master 13. They’re now friends on Steam and as my son so eloquently put it “When it’s my birthday you can buy me games”. Sigh.

Miss 10 is a little more circumspect. She likes to hold back and observe until she’s considered all things. Then she talks. And talk they did.

As I’d already met Mum and my family over in Somerset and have connected with my Father and half-brother over the last few years, it wasn’t too emotionally challenging for me. Apart from an occasional “wow” moment when people around us observe mannerisms and speech patterns that are clearly genetic rather than learned. For my Mum though it’s been a completion. She’s naturally a tad pessimistic and was worried that my kids would ‘hate her on sight’. This of course was quite silly. She’s mentioned that for the first time in her life she feels directly involved rather than being on the periphery of family goings-on.

An interesting observation is that my mother and father don’t have any real experience of being grandparents so the relationship that will develop between them and my kids is going to be quite different to those my kids have with my adoptive parents and their grandparents on their mothers’ side. It’ll be more adult than anything. It will be interesting to see how that progresses.

It’s been good showing mum around parts of Auckland. She’s got to meet my ex (the mother of my kids) briefly and has started to get a real sense of my world. She has realised how similar to her I am.

My dad has been staying with my half-brother this week and has joined us on occasion. We visited Kelly Tarlton’s (yes, it’s the one thing my mum wanted to see in Auckland – she loves aquariums) and then yesterday, we all met my adoptive parents for a cuppa and a chat.

Well… by ‘chat’ I mean that the four somewhat deaf senior citizens paired off and started talking. The kids and I were surplus to the occasion so we ended up playing cards. My birth parents and my adoptive parents had a lifetime of catching up to do. They’d never met before.

So the missing pieces of my life are found. And with this visit, my life has come full circle.

Very interesting times indeed.