I remember many times after that appointment looking in the mirror at myself and seeing things just a little bit differently. Hmmm....Native American, huh? Suddenly having dark eyes and high cheekbones began to mean something to me. Maybe I could have been an Indian princess. :) You might be wondering what is such a big deal about this anyway. Well, my whole life I had known nothing of my ethnicity at all. When I would ask my parents, they would just tell me I was "just American". I always thought that it was cool when someone could say they were German, Italian, etc. They had a piece of culture and history that they could embrace. When I lived in Romania, the people there often thought I looked Romanian so I had sometimes wondered if that could even be a possibility. For me to be able to say that I had some Native American in me was super cool because I finally felt like there was a piece of culture I could claim as my own. Not long before this discovery, I had dyed my hair a darker brown and started wearing some jewelry that was made with rocks, so I began to say that those fashion decisions were obviously based on my heritage and the fact that I was indeed an Indian princess. It was just "in me".
Now I could stop here because really this is where this particular part of the story ended. Nothing came out of this discovery as far as my search goes, at least not for a while. But to save myself from the hate emails and death threats of having such a short post, I will keep going. But in order to do so, you have to fast forward with me a year and a half to late Spring 2014.
I had taken Zoe to piano lessons. She takes from a sweet 80+ year old lady, Mrs. Martin, who was my piano teacher when I was a little girl. That particular day when I arrived, Mrs. Martin told me that her daughter, Kathy, was here visiting and I could come in and talk with her if I wanted to. I knew Kathy from when I was younger as we had gone to church together and our dad's both worked at Piedmont Bible College. Kathy and her brother had also been adopted so we had that in common too. We started chatting and she began telling me about how she had done some DNA testing and even though she had not been able to locate any close relatives, she had been able to get some medical information from the testing. She had also been able to figure out her ethnicity and some other information from it too.
I came home and told Steve about it and after some thought and online investigation of my own, I ordered a DNA kit from ancestry.com. It arrived just a few days later and after I spit into the little tube, I excitedly sent the packet back off in the mail again. It seemed like forever before I heard anything. Finally the email arrived that said they had received my DNA and were processing it and then not too long after the email came saying my results were finished. In reality, the whole process took only about a months time but the wait felt much longer.
I logged into my account and began looking at the different charts and graphs that would give me information about myself. There was a list of DNA relatives, but none of the known relatives were particularly close in relation. Then I got to the ancestry composition graph. 99.8% European, 0.2% of a mixture of other things so insignificant that I cannot remember at this point in time what they were, and 0% Native American. Yep, that is right. No Native American in me whatsoever. I could not believe it. That isn't what the eye doctor had said! I even called ancestryDNA to make sure that they hadn't mixed up my test with someone else's. They assured me they hadn't . When I told them that my eye doctor was sure I had Native American in me and that the test said I didn't, they told me that the ancestry percentage may change over time as their process continued to be refined.
I just couldn't believe it. I was so disappointed.
The following day, Zoe was going to my parents for the day and Josiah was going to go to a playdate in the afternoon with a friend. I went over to their house in the morning to drop her off and when I got there, I began to tell my parents about the test results. I don't remember exactly how the conversation went, but at the end of it, my dad said, "If you have a few minutes, we can find the information that the adoption agency gave us about your birth parents when you were adopted and you can have a copy of it." I agree to help him look and TWO HOURS later, we found it in an old filing cabinet in the garage. He said they had always tried to keep our adoption files hidden so we wouldn't accidentally come across them if we were looking through their drawers. I guess they had done a good job of hiding it if at 40 years of age it took me so long to help him find it. :)
As you can see from the following picture, there really wasn't much information on the paper at all. One half sheet of paper typed. That was it. When my younger brother was adopted in 1982, my parents received a whole file folder full of stuff on him. It didn't seem fair. As I read through the paper, there really wasn't much on there that my parents hadn't already told me, except for maybe the part about my birth father having a growth removed from an arm pit. That part made me chuckle then and still does today as that seems like such an odd detail to include.
I left with the paper in hand and went home. There was a bit of time before I had to take Josiah to his playdate. I went in my bedroom with the paper and my computer and decided it was time to try to search again. As I stared at the paper wondering if there was any bit of information that could help me with my search, one thing seemed to jump off the page at me. Of course, why I had I never thought about this before.
"Since she was adopted as an infant, we know nothing of her natural parents."
If I was adopted and searching for my birth mother, who is to say that my birth mother didn't do the same since she was adopted herself. Maybe, just maybe, I could find a family tree or something else that talked about HER being adopted. So I googled once again.
Carol Close + Adopted.
The results came up and the second hit caught my attention. I clicked on the link and I could not believe what I was reading.....
And yes, I am sure by now you know what is coming....... more on this next time. ;)
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