I found my father!!!

 

I found my father! Yes! It’s true!

After searching for him for most of my life, and especially the last ten years, I found my father through a DNA match! It's OFFICIAL, there is NO DOUBT!

Imagine my surprise that my father, Gus, is ALIVE, and 92 years old, and still living in the place that he and my mother met!

Adoptees Who Search: There's Always Something Left to Do!

 

When I was searching for my maternal family, I went by the saying, “There’s always something left to do!” Every time I thought I had exhausted all avenues and there was literally nothing left to do, I was wrong. There was always another stone left unturned and if I thought long and hard enough, I would discover it. I’ve taken to using this as my motto for the paternal search as well.  For any adoptee who is searching and feeling like you've come to the end -- you haven't. I promise. 

Keep going!

With my maternal search, "something left to do" was limited to the search itself. With my paternal search, DNA testing has changed things.

Adopted and Searching: Today I'm Venting

I’ve got to get this off my chest, so here goes.

Usually I do not use this blog to vent, but to share my journey, educate, and open people’s minds to another way of understanding life adopted. But today, I'm ready to rant.

So this week I met a man. His name is Kenny. He’s the nicest man in the world. I’ll take it further – he’s not just nice, he’s amazing. When I take my next trip to Virginia, I’ll be stopping off to have coffee with Kenny, for sure.

It’s amazing how in just a week’s time you can connect on a deep level with someone. I'm part of a Facebook group that is made up of people from my natural mother's hometown. I joined in hopes that someone there would know something and help me. These people have been so kind and generous to me, trying to do anything it takes to help me with my search. It was recommended by some of them that I talk to Kenny. His family lived only a few doors down from my natural mom's family and they are very well known in town. Not only that but his 94 year old mom is still alive and has a mind as sharp as a tack.  

The Disappointment of a Lack of Close DNA Matches

I used to see this in my inbox and get terribly excited. My heart would race and my fingers couldn’t log in fast enough.

 

Now I see this notification and sometimes I don’t even log in right away.

Everyone says, “Don’t stop believing…”

 

Honestly some days I do, and some days I don’t.

 

My faith is high for other people, and other things, but when it comes to having faith for myself, it’s often low. Maybe it’s that adoptee curse of always feeling like you will be the one who is different.  

 

I logged in yesterday to see my matches and none of them even made the front page. They weren't close enough....like 5th-8th cousins.

Unless my father lives to be an extremely old man of Biblical proportions, time is running out.

I continue to hold on to all of my many blessings in life, and accept the fact that this may not be one of them.

Beauty, Pain, Wholeness and NAAM: All of These Things Are Not Like the Other

I’m going to do something crazy.

I’m going to try to write something every day in the month of November for NAAM. (National Adoption Awareness Month). Pick yourself up off the floor.

I need to do this right now like I need a hole in the head. I’m a little over a month away from graduating with my masters degree in leadership, my oldest son is getting married in 10 days, and I have a full time job and my house is a mess, and, and, and……

But my newsfeed on every social media site has already been flooded with NAAM posts from the people who aren’t experts. (People who aren’t adoptees.) And it grates on me more this year than it has in a while. I guess it's because I still haven’t solved my paternal search and I just want to scream, “Shut up, people!” Stop talking about beauty until all people know who and where they came from. Seriously, I’m tired of hearing about beauty.  Until I’m not poring over DNA results from four sites with tears streaming down my face at 2 am in the freaking morning hoping for a different result than I have been getting for four years…just save all your talk about beauty for somebody else that isn’t in the grip of the closed adoption system. The grasp it has on you is suffocating at times. I do believe there is wholeness even in the destruction that is closed adoption. For me it has been my faith that has made it possible. And, it's an ongoing journey. Just when you think you're alright, somebody hands you a clipboard at a doctors office to fill out several pages of forms you can't give any information on. And you feel like throwing it against the wall and walking out. And you wonder if you will die one day never knowing any of that information. Or more importantly, whether you  will die BECAUSE you didn't have the information you should have had to write on the paper, that could have saved your life if only you knew your family history.

Right now in my studies we are reading a few books that really blow the door wide open on my thoughts about all this. One book is Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership by Ruth Haley Barton. Her subject is Moses and she talks all about his adoption and the ramifications it has on his psyche and his leadership. I had to write a five page paper on this for an upcoming class that starts Monday and my only issue was limiting my thoughts to five pages.

Here’s an excerpt from the book:

“The soul of leadership begins with who we are – really. Not who we think we are, not who we would like to be, not who others believe us to be. God’s call includes (yet is not limited to) the particularities of our life, our heritage, our personality, our foibles, our passions and deepest orientation, and even our current life situation.”[1] 

When I read this, tears ran down my face. God’s call includes the particularities of our life and our heritage.   

What are the ramifications of this for the adoptee in a closed adoption system?

   

---

[1] Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 74.

Live Your Life Like a DNA Test

"Don't ever give up!" It's the resounding cry to all on so many adoptee support pages.

I agree.

I believe.

I encourage others to keep believing.

More people are testing their DNA than ever, and there is more potential for results than ever.

And yet sometimes, I can’t be the one to carry the search for a while. Even though it’s my own.

My friend Gayle came to me a while back and said, “Let me handle the search. Don’t focus on it right now, just let me do it.” I never asked her to do that. I would never expect her to do that. But, she offered. And in my exhaustion, I fell into her arms and simply said, “thank you.”

Gayle taking the lead came after previous searches that slayed me. I cried more tears cried than I ever knew I had inside me each time a DNA test came back and wasn't a match. On the one where I met "M" and so desperately wanted her to be family, I remember getting the results and immediately scheduling a massage, my whole body hurt so much because of the anguish. I can still call up in my mind what it was like to lay on that massage table with tears falling down through the face hole the entire time, gathering a literal puddle on the floor. After all of that and more, I think Gayle knew instinctively that I didn’t know if I had one more try in me. She said, “When you don’t have it in you, I have it in me…”

Gayle has told me she will never, ever, ever, ever, ever give up. And I love her for it. I expect nothing and she gives everything. She works tirelessly with all of my DNA results and makes trees. And then more trees. She comes up for air once in a while and tells me if she found anything.

Although I haven’t struck DNA gold yet, I still recommend DNA testing to everyone. I have discovered so much through DNA that has been valuable to my search. Last August through new DNA results on Ancestry, a family secret in my biological maternal family was revealed. My natural mother had warned me that if I did DNA I may "upset the apple cart" (her exact words) and now I know what she was talking about.  In reality, it upsets absolutely no one's apple cart who is committed to living truthfully and transparently.

Through the revelation of that secret, I came to realize that we had been headed in the wrong direction for a while. My search team wasted a lot of time barking up the wrong trees because of misinformation. There were tips I was given that were lies…with no other intention than to throw me off on the search. It’s my thought that one reason it was important for them to try to throw me off was because if and when I find my natural father, it may have potential to reveal more on the details of the other secrets. 

Being lied to hurts but it’s built my resolve even more on how to live. And I’ll take it this far to say – how God wants everyone to live.

We need to all live like a DNA test.

It doesn’t lie.