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Prepare for a long story.
About a year and a half ago I got a long email from a man claiming to be my half brother. I showed the email to my mother and she confirmed it. When she was a teenager she got pregnant. My grandparents shipped her off to a convent to give birth and the boy was put up for adoption.
Fast forward a couple of decades and he has managed, through his job as a psychiatrist, to unseal sealed record to find out who his mother is. He contacts my mother and for a while they have contact, mostly through email until my mother let it be known that she doesn't want to have any contact with him any more.
She doesn't do this because she doesn't care but because it is causing a lot of bad memories about her family to come to the surface again and she can't cope with it. I can remember this period very well, although I didn't know what was going on, because the stress was often taken out on me (not physically or in any other way abusive but it just wasn't a fun period).
Fast forward another 8 years and I get the email. Which caused me a lot of stress. With what happened in my past (bullying) I find it very hard to trust people and this hasn't helped my trust issues. I never reacted to the email because of the way it was written. He didn't ask anything about me, or my sister, he just wrote about him and, basically, how he wants to have contact with our mother again.
My mother still doesn't want any contact with him, for her that chapter of her life is now closed; she has answered his questions, she has gone to a therapist to deal with her problems and she wants to leave it at that. Because of the tone of the email I never responded, I didn't want to get caught between him and mother and I don't want to be used by him to force my mother to do something she doesn't want to do. He never emailed me or tried to contact me in any way.
Until about half an hour ago. When he rang to doorbell. My mother is outside talking with him and I'm sitting here with clammy hands,my racing heart and trying to slow my breath. I'm hoping he doesn't want to see me because I don't think I'm ready for that, I'm not sure if and when that will be, mostly because of the first impression he gave me through the email. It might be mean and selfish of me but one and a half year ago it caused me a lot of anxiety. Maybe if he would have gone about it more carefully about it it would have been easier but not now and not so sudden.
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