Just what am I looking for?

A great quote from Barack's book:

"What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and siblings, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?"

Soon after this reflection, he learns that the young man who he thought was his half-brother (and bonded with under that assumption), might actually have had a different father. He wonders, "And what about Bernard-- should my feelings for him somehow be different now?"

There's an implicit understanding of family in the eagerness of my search that may not be true, or at least may not hold up in reality. For Barack, finding his extended African family did fill in his empty page, but it didn't bring to a close his question of where do I belong. The blood relatives he found didn't offer the clear line of distinction he longed for between his people and everyone else.

I know I can't not have eagerness when I consider meeting a blood relative. I have never met one, nor have I ever seen my resemblance in the face of another. Has the absence of this DNA connection to another spawned an inflated hope in the healing power of knowing a blood relative? Absolutely. Though I can't not have this inflated hope, I feel more prepared somehow knowing I can't not have it. It's like I'm already able to grieve the let down I haven't experienced yet.

This kind of understanding is what I felt lacking in myself after my last attempt at searching. Now, I take the first tentative steps...