Patricia Long Legs is running and playing out in the meadow with her adopted goat siblings at my birth father Jerry’s farm, and I am thinking about genetic mirrors. The farm is named Camelot, after his last name of Knight, but everyone calls him Pop. It’s a sunny Spring day, and I am standing along a barb-wire fence watching the baby calf take on a new day. I realize it’s been 7 months since Pop and I met, so Patricia is 7 months old. But now her mom and dad are gone, and she stands alone in a field of goats. I can’t help but wonder. Will she grow up thinking she’s a goat?

The day I arrived at Camelot, Patricia’s mother, in what seemed a symbolic gesture of her appreciation for life and Pop’s new-found daughter, gave birth to her own, a beautiful female calf. Pop and his wife Susan observed how long the little calf’s legs were, how shiny the coat, how quickly she stood and tried to walk, so they named her after me. Even with an adoptive father who worked as a meat inspector at slaughter houses, never did I dream I would have a cow named after me, but somehow it certainly fits.

Now those who know me are asking themselves,’but Patricia doesn’t have long legs?’ And they would be right, I don’t. It was just that in one of the first pictures Pop and Susan ever saw of me, I was sitting in such a way that my crossed legs looked a mile long. Similarly, the pictures I had seen of Pop, standing next to an unnaturally low to the ground bird bath, had set into my mind that he was one Tall Texan.

So chewing these thoughts, while Patricia trims the fence line, I realize Pop and I both erroneously expected to meet someone tall at the top of his long driveway. Instead, I think upon laying eyes on the other we thought, ‘Hey this person is short’ and here is the kicker, ‘just like me.’

Having already met my birth mother, it was a second dose for me of ‘Wow this person looks like me,’ but it was none the less potent. My birth mother and I had found we shared matching smiles, almost identical hands and feet, even an inflexibility with how we handle the world, as well as each other.

I saw things between us that I knew to be true about myself, but not all of what I saw were things I necessarily liked about myself. A simple truth I had never considered – a mirror reflects all parts of yourself.  While I discovered so much in meeting her, I still had not found the person with my eyes, my skin tone, and perhaps most importantly, the person who could mirror my personality and disposition.

True to my adoptee tendencies, I felt guilty for my disjointed feelings; that I had not found in my birth mother the profound reflection and connection for which I had so dreamed.  This, of course, was not to her discredit it just was what it was.

Furthermore, had I unfairly expected her to complete me, without realizing that half the equation was missing? After meeting her, I both longed for, yet also feared my complete picture. It was as if seeing half of my reflection had made the remaining mystery parts feel even more foreign and somehow more threatening.

What if I find him and he does not match as much as I would hope either? Would that not mean that I just really don’t have a clue about myself? What if I meet them both and see nothing I recognize as my own? What if I see things in that mirror that I don’t like? Where does that leave me? Those were my fears, steeped in a mixture of insecurity and the unknown, driving up that long driveway to meet my birth father.

Not far from the driveway where we stood that day, Patricia Long Legs is now romping around in the sun with her buddies. In the last few months, she and I have come to have more in common than you might expect; and this is really what this post is about. Note the title does say “the importance of genetic mirrors in the adoptee’s world.”

Well, Patricia the long-legged calf, you see, was born into a world of short-legged goats. She had no sibling calves or cousin calves. She was the only calf on the farm, to be specific she and her parents, Mama Cow and Daddy Bull, were the only cows on the farm, period. They lived among a world of goats, and life in general was good for Patricia playing with the goats and watching the cars drive by the fence line with Mama Cow and Daddy Bull. But one day, not long after Patricia could do her own thing, Mama Cow and Daddy Bull went on let’s say a “permanent vacation” from the farm.

This, of course, left little Patricia sitting alone out there in a field of goats. Did she keep to herself? No. Like any good abandoned calf knows, she knew she must assimilate to survive. And this is why now several months later, Patricia can be found running and playing in the field kicking up her heels right along with the others. This is why she raises her long snout up into the tree branches looking longingly like she wishes to follow her adopted siblings up the leaning trunks to chew on the highest leaves; why she comes when you call “Billie Billie.”

In this video, my daughter and grandson feed Patricia the cow with my birth father (their grandfather).