Bonus episode 1

Adoptees often face proverbial brick walls within their birth or adoptive family. These walls are fortified by misplaced
loyalty, secrets, lies, (many of  being lies by omission) and the like.  Many times well-meaning people will take up the cause of those who are committed to live in secrets and lies. Sometimes they are even loyal to the dead, which is the most bizarre of all. 

If you keep secrets, you don’t love.   

If you lie, you don’t love.

If you build a wall with people who have done nothing but seek
the truth and are committed to live in truth, that’s not love.

Why don’t we go where the light is…where the love is? It’ because we may not think we deserve it. That’s how I felt until very recently. 

I am determined to a fault. Giving up is not my strong suit. And, for so long I did not want to
let go of toxic people just because  I
went through hell and back to find them. 

My walking path yesterday

Sometimes we have spent so much time walking
in the wrong direction, we keep doing it just because we are so committed to
it. We started out on this road, and by God we’re gonna finish on it! We feel like we have to keep walking down that same path because we’ve
invested so much.  Do we really expect the wrong direction to suddenly become right?  I did. For a long time, I did. I’m also a believer in miracles, and in people’s ability to change. God knows I’ve changed. I believe other people can too. But sometimes, they don’t. And there we are on the same broken down God-forsaken path that we are hoping beyond hope will change. The difficult truth is that everyone is not committed to truth, change and growth.

Life with toxic people is a one-way street. It won’t lead you back to where you belong. And
it prevents you from spending all the time you can with the people who really care about you.
If they lie to you, keep secrets from you or expect you to play along in any kind of
make-believe world, that is NOT OKAY. 

It’s not normal.

It’s not healthy.

It’s not love.

Through some close
friends who have walked with me on this journey, I finally have it through to
my head that people who treat me this way do not deserve me. Life is too short to pursue people
who don’t have enough respect to tell you the truth and to live in the truth.

Someone who has to hide
their relationship with you doesn’t deserve you. Someone who tells people you
are a “friend” when you are really their son or daughter doesn’t deserve you.
Someone who tells people they have two children when they really have three
doesn’t deserve you. Someone who says they have one sibling and not two doesn’t
deserve you. Someone who takes up for their secretive lying family member to preserve their “dignity” pride doesn’t
deserve you. Someone who lies to you about who your father is, they do not love
you. Someone who gives you false clues about who your father is to throw you off track and preserve your mother’s secret doesn’t love you. If someone says they do not know who your father is, but they really do,
they do not love you. If they say they know absolutely nothing about him or the situation but they know even a shred of truth, they do not deserve the blessing of you.

Life is too short to
live in their fantasy world!!!  This is not as complicated as some people make it out to be. If they
do not speak the truth and if they do not support you knowing the truth, they are
not kind. They do not love you.  They are not a nice person. They are not a good person. It’s as
simple as that. God has more for you than this. You do not have to be a
suffering saint on behalf of your birth family, your adoptive family, or anyone in this world!! No
one has been given the destiny of a doormat and you were not created to be
anyone’s dirty little secret!   

I have finally realized that there are pure-hearted people who actually care, who
love me or have the potential to truly love me (and vice versa) who have been
begging me to meet for coffee and the like but I just haven’t made the time
yet. Guess what, I’m making time!!

I’m so sorry to all the friends who
told me, “you deserve more than this” while I kept banging my head against the
proverbial wall trying to keep a connection with toxic people. 

Welcome to 2019 and a gal who finally knows her value.

My friends and I are still hard at work on my father-search. I go into any potential paternal reunion a different person. This search WILL ultimately result in success
at some point. The DNA databases are exploding. They say it’s only a matter of
time before everyone on the planet has a first or second cousin on both sides. And more people are testing
internationally every day. More Greek matches are coming for me, for sure. I am going
into my paternal reunion in a different head space. My father may be dead by
that time my case is solved, but the rules will apply for any family member I meet. I will go into
this future reunion knowing my value. That will make for a very different
scenario than it did with my maternal reunion. I’m entering this from a place
of strength, not weakness.

Join me, my friend. Let go of what is toxic in 2019. Live in truth and love and make room for all the goodness God has for
you. Wonderful people will line up to meet you for coffee, I promise.        

Yesterday was three weeks since the DNA test was sent in to
Ancestry. My friend Regina and I have both been checking for results
about 30 times a day. I know the time given is 4-6 weeks, however some people have
been known to get results earlier. I just keep the Ancestry app open on my phone, next to me.

This is my week at school, and I’m in the classroom all day
long hearing lectures and engaging in class discussion. Yesterday our professor did a
magic trick with a quarter, as an illustration. His execution of this trick was stellar, and every student in our class was struggling with moving on to
the next topic without him telling us how he ‘magically’ moved the quarter from
one place to another. He dismissed our questions and went on to  lecture about something else and someone
would raise their hand and ask about the quarter. This went on for a few hours.
We just wouldn’t let it go. The whole point of his illustration was that the curiosity would drive us crazy and we would keep asking about how he did it. And
it worked!

Once he had proved his point he said, “Curiosity is a sign of
intelligence. Wanting to know is a sign of intelligence.”

I instantly thought, “Hmmm…I must be pretty smart!!” (Bahahahaha!!)

Once he told us the point of this whole thing, which was staying curious and going after what we have a drive to find out, all I could think about is the fact that I believe it’s literal
mental torture (no, I am not exaggerating, I really do believe it is mental
torture) to not know who one or both of your biological parents are.

My professor sharing about curiosity and the drive to know validated something in
me where I was comforted that I’m not crazy. Although it’s threatened to drive me off a cliff at times, I’m normal. There is nothing wrong with me. It’s perfectly okay that I don’t want to let this go, that I
can’t just let this go.

Just like our class needed to know where that darn quarter
was, I need to know who my father is.