LOYAL. KIND. PERSISTENT. I grew up in a small resort town on the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan, a community of about 8,000 year-round residents. I’m the youngest of seven children, raised in a Catholic family. I was baptized Catholic, but unlike my six older siblings—who attended Catholic school and mass regularly—my religious upbringing ended […]
EXPLORER. RESEARCHER. MENTOR. “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” I was in college and had an inkling that I was really different from the rest of my family. My dad approached me on one of the many trips I took out west to see him, and asked for a DNA test.
RESILIENT. EMPATHETIC. CURIOUS. Do you know who the favorite is in your family? If you don’t, NEWSFLASH—it’s likely you. As the sixth of seven children, I always believed I was my dad’s favorite. You couldn’t tell me otherwise. He never admitted it—what good dad would? But it was one of those unspoken truths I carried
COURAGEOUS. SUPPORTIVE. POSITIVE. I grew up always knowing my “dad” was not my biological father. I was 6 years old when my stepdad adopted me. I was raised to believe that my biological father left and did not want me. I was told that he did not provide any financial support and had no interest
EVOLVING. RESILIENT. HOPEFUL. I took an Ancestry DNA test, and my world was flipped upside down when I got my results July 26, 2021. Oddly enough, I finally decided to purchase my test kit during the Father’s Day sale that year. I will forever remember the day I got my results. For some reason, I can
Adopted during infancy, Monica’s childhood is marked by trauma and dysfunction. As a teenager, she dulls her pain with risky behavior and petty crime. In adulthood, she turns to drugs and alcohol. In this video narrative, she talks about her adoption, troubled youth, and the relinquishment of her daughter with candor and compassion. Her memoir
HEALING. GENERATIONAL. TRAUMA. :::Trigger Warning::: This true story contains incidents of abuse, rape, and incest.::: My maternal great grandfather was a Grand Imperial Wizard in the KKK. After he was murdered at the age of 35, great grandmother was left with four kids to raise l, so becoming a brothel madam was easy money. Pay
RELENTLESS. CARING. PATIENT. Easter weekend, 1967 while my father’s great aunt we received a call to say that my maternal grandmother had died. I was the oldest of four, my brothers were eight and six, and my little sister was four. Since I was the oldest and for some reason often butted heads with my
GUARDED. EMPATHETIC. LOVING. How to do you put your life story into a page? You leave out a lot of the darkest parts of the journey and pray it makes sense to the reader. I grew up in a cloud of mystery. My “parents” did not look like the normal picture of what they should,
COURAGEOUS. CARING. GRIEF STRICKEN. For nearly 43 years I lived a lie. I had no clue. My dad that raised me was also clueless. My mother claims she did not think I was another man’s child, but given the several different narratives she has said to me and the timeline she claims for the “encounter”
