I’m very tied into adoption. I’m an adoptive mom (my five year old son is from South Korea). My mother in law is a birthmother - who has gone through a “reunion” (horrible word, btw), so I have a sister in law who is/is not my husband’s sister. But the story I want to tell mouthbreathers is my father’s.
My father is a WWII baby. His parents married when his bio father was stationed in the Twin Cities. By the time he was old enough to remember anything, his parents had been long divorced and his birth father had moved back to whatever part of the country he was from. His mother always told him his father had just left them (the true story turns out to be, of course, much more complicated). My grandmother remarried when my dad was six, and my grandfather was always a wonderful dad to my father and adopted him.
Fast forward thirty odd years. My dad gets a phone call. A woman who says she is his birth fathers wife, they are in town, specifically to see him, and she would like to know if he can make some time for them! They are willing to come back in a few months if he needs to think it over.
Within a few days, my bio-grandfather and his wife were having dinner with us. He’d been driven by a need to make sure his son was OK (my grandmother had cut off all contact and not returned letters, nor did my dad ever receive the gifts his bio dad had sent - she is not a woman without her problems). That he’d made the right decision signing away his parental rights to my grandfather. Things had changed a lot in 30-odd years. He had worried that maybe my dad had died in Vietnam. His second wife and he had never had children. He had little family, so it was my dad and his wife. His wife died of cancer several years later.
I’m sure it was tough for my dad to go through this, but it has been rewarding. His biofather hasn’t asked much of him - my parents have visited his several times in the past thirty years, generally when they are in the neighborhood. He sends us “grandchildren” baby gifts and wedding presents. Its allowed my dad some answers on his health (they are both thin type II diabetics) and background. He has learned a little about his early life.
I wouldn’t have great expectations for a reunion. If you decide to do this, you may want to call around and find someone to mediate it - particularly given your reluctance. According to her letter, she believes that at some time you did indicate you wanted to find her, she found you on line through some sort of adoption registry - if that is true, she doesn’t believe this is coming completely out of the blue for you. She’s had years to reconsider contact - and back then everyone had to say there would be no further contact. She has given you a lot (and I’m not talking about that whole gift of life thing, her contact letter told her most of the stuff you adoptees wonder about) hoping for something in return. I’m not saying you owe her anything in return.
(My MILs reunion story is much more awkward, although both parties initiated search, so it wasn’t a surprise for either of them. Its just that both of them have spent twenty years now trying to figure out how they fit in each others lives - and at different times they are at odds - one needing more, the other pulling back. That is the example of “don’t expect to much, these people don’t make for instant family” I use.)
But sometimes you gotta make do with what you have in your house.