Brittany’s DNA Surprise

This transcript was generated automatically. Its accuracy may vary.

Speaker 1

The mirror thing was the first thing I experienced for sure, So much so I got a tattoo of a broken mirror because I I think that when I first started going through this and I think that therapy helped me get to this point, but I didn't realize how much power I gave to those things either.

I needed to be more confident in myself and who I am as a person at that time.

But because I was so broken down by the lies and the betrayal and the sadness and the hurt, I allowed all of those other feelings to like creep in and make me change how I felt about myself.

It's almost like relearning yourself.

Like I thought I knew who I was, but joke's on me, I didn't.

And now I need to relearn who I am and kind of like, teach myself who I am because I feel like I have these tools now I didn't have before that allow me to see things differently.

Speaker 2

Welcome to DNA Surprises, a podcast that delves into the world of unexpected DNA discoveries.

I'm your host, Alexis ourselves.

In July 2021, my life took a surprising turn when I found out that I'm an NPE, a person who has experienced a non paternal event.

In other words, my biological father isn't who I thought he was.

Join me as we explore the stories of NP, ES, adoptees and donor conceived people and their families.

Get ready to unravel the astonishing journeys that begin with a simple DNA test.

This is DNA surprises.

Hindsight is 2020.

After experiencing ADNA surprise, it's easy to look back at moments throughout our childhoods and realize that the truth was there all along.

Growing up in Indiana, Brittany always felt like an outsider.

Her parents were divorced, and when she asked her father if she could go live with him, he revealed that he wasn't her biological father, which her mother denied.

Years later, Brittany took ADNA test, which revealed that her lifelong father was not her biological father.

In this episode, Brittany shares how the revelation rocked her sense of identity and her lifelong relationships.

She also discusses how she's connected with her new found family and found a sense of belonging.

Thank you for sharing your story, Brittany.

Speaker 3

My name is Brittany.

I am 30 years old and I'm from Central IN.

I grew up with my mom and my little brother.

It was mostly just like the three of us as like a core family unit.

I grew up with AI don't call him my birth certificate.

Father and I, I'll kind of get into that, but I call him my lifelong father now.

I grew up with him.

He was around so often.

I would see him on holidays as a teenager.

I kind of would see him more when I had friends in his neighborhood I would hang out with, but it was really just me and my mom and my brother most of the time.

She was a bartender, so she worked nights, weekends, really all of the time that we weren't in school when she was working, it was just me and my brother.

He was born in 2000, so we have like a six year age gap.

So I kind of feel like I took on more of like a mother role for him, not really a sister.

I think now that I know my DNA surprise, I think there are some things that kind of stick out to me like as a kid that I kind of should have seen as a red flag that maybe I just missed.

Or I think some of them, they kind of were explained away.

So I was just trusting in the fact that the things that the people were telling me were true.

A couple of them were, we were on Medicaid growing up and you had to present like you're supporting documents, your pay stubs, your birth certificates, all of these things.

And I remember one time we went to the office and I noticed that I had no father listed on my birth certificate.

It had my mom's name and then the.

Birth father was blank.

And now I know it's like a silly story, but then she told me that my dad had got into some trouble and he wasn't there at the time of the signing.

So I kind of was like, OK, that makes sense.

And my dad was known for getting into trouble when I was in a kid, so kind of made sense.

There was a couple other things where you'd go through like high school and you would go through biology class and they are talking about your different traits and how they're passed down to you.

And I have a widow's peak, I call it this avatar arrow on my forehead.

It's very noticeable.

And when you're in that class, those are the kind of rare DNA traits that you pass down that you try to backtrack where you got it from.

That was one thing that no one in my family had.

So that was kind of an unexplained mystery.

And then I think the last thing that kind of piqued my interest and the possibility of taking ADNA test when I was in high school, my dad, I was over at his house and I didn't want to be living at my mom's house anymore.

I was going through that phase where teenage girls just don't like their moms.

And I wanted to go live with my dad.

And it was always, no, you can't live here.

No, it's not possible.

And I finally just asked him like, why?

Why can't I?

This is what I want to do.

And at that age, I feel like most of my friends that had divorced or separated parents, they were able to choose where they wanted to live.

So I didn't really understand why I couldn't go live with my dad.

And one night he told me that there was a possibility that he was not my dad.

That shocked me.

I think I was 15 when I went home that weekend to to my mom's house.

I asked her about it and her first reaction was anger.

She just was upset that I was even asking the question.

It was just so far fetched.

She made it seem that like I was being outlandish.

It was kind of just something that was dropped.

I kind of just moved on and was like whatever, I can't live with my dad, it is what it is and just kept on moving.

When I was in high school, I met my now husband.

My life kind of changed then.

I wasn't necessarily in my brother's mom anymore.

I kind of had my own life, my own things I was doing.

I think I started focusing more on me.

Then I moved out of my mom's house very soon after I turned 18.

I moved right in with my boyfriend, now husband.

I think it was just always this like overwhelming feeling of being an outsider that kind of really pushed me to take the test.

So when you took the test, yes, were you thinking my maybe my dad is not my biological father?

Was it just wanting to get some answers about who you were and why you felt like an outsider?

Yeah, I think it was more so answers with my brother and my brother's dad being in the picture.

I was kind of always this, the outsider within that family.

Once my brother and his dad entered the picture.

And then on the flip side, at my dad's house, he was then married to a new lady and my dad then had stepchildren.

So I kind of then felt like a outsider there.

I think the goal of it was definitely to see if anything popped up for my dad.

I was working and my boss at the time, she was telling me that she took the ancestry test and that she had found a sister she didn't know existed.

And I think at that point, it kind of opened my eyes to, OK, maybe I do have a different dad, but then also what if I have other siblings I don't know about?

And I think that that was like the real push.

I had such a close relationship with my little brother, kind of raising him as we were kids.

And I couldn't imagine loving another person as much as I love him sibling wise.

So I think that that possibility also piqued a lot of my interest in taking it.

But on the same note, I was super nervous.

There was a man that was in and out of like me and my mom's life as a child, as a family friend is what he would be referred to as, and I always thought I kind of looked like him.

I didn't see any similarities in me and my dad or any of my dad's family, so I think I was always just curious.

This specific family friend had actually passed away a few years before I took my test, so I was either expecting that nothing was going to come back at all, it was just going to be empty results, or that it may possibly pop up with this other guy who had passed away.

And so I was kind of preparing myself for those two possibilities.

I ordered the test on the Father's Day sale, which I think is really weird now that I look back at it.

And so I ordered it.

I took the test immediately and sent it off.

And I think exactly 6 weeks to the day later, I got a notification on my phone saying that my results were ready.

I was at my husband's grandparents house.

We were just hanging out.

I think we were having dinner or something.

I remember being so speechless and just frozen that I wasn't sure what to do.

So I kind of excused myself and went outside and I opened the results.

The person that popped up as like my close family member and I'm, I'm sure a lot of people experienced this when it first pops up, the kind of like classification or category that they give you is very broad.

So like you have a close match, but it doesn't necessarily say this is your brother, this is your nephew, this is your uncle.

With how the DNA works, I guess there's options for each one.

So at first I thought it was a cousin or something that I had found.

I had no idea who it was though, the first or the last name.

So I kind of immediately went to Facebook to kind of Google and search.

Oddly enough, the person that I was linked to is my half brother.

And he goes by an abbreviation of his name that was not listed on Ancestry.

So it was very difficult to locate who he was.

So we had to search through the names just by comparing the tiny picture on Ancestry to the pictures on Facebook to try to locate.

Him.

My husband kind of took over that Facebook search after I'd got my results.

I instantly went straight to my mom and I was, I need answers.

Who is this person?

Do you know anyone they're related to?

And at the time, I wasn't like really speaking to my mom.

We were not on good terms.

So it was kind of just an awkward situation in general.

Went to her house to talk to her, she wasn't there.

So I went home.

And when I got home, I remember kind of just collapsing.

I went to my guest bed and I remember screaming and crying and drooling.

Almost like I was so just out of sorts that there was no calming me down.

What were you thinking at that point?

Like what was causing that reaction?

I think it was the unknown.

At first I think I was just upset of not knowing I had found the secret out.

I found something out obviously because it was someone I had never heard of or didn't know that I was related to in any way.

And I think the first thing that I felt was hurt at the same time that my mom called me back, and then that the same time my husband figured out who this person was, it was kind of the same time.

So my mom calls and she's basically in denial.

She says that my test got mixed up in the mail, that it's someone else's results, not mine, that the person that the person I matched to, my half brother, their dad, there's no possibility that he was my dad, is what she was saying.

Maybe he was my cousin and one of my mom's siblings had been with someone in his family, but nothing that would have confirmed this match to me.

And I think that that was a big hurdle to get over that this, the DNA, the spinning in the tube and all of this can lead to the results that it led to.

DNA doesn't lie.

So we have the information.

Now let's take the information we have and figure something out with it.

At the same time, my husband found my half brother on Facebook so we kind of pieced together who it was, how it was and I would say for the first two weeks it was me just kind of being sad and just dealing with it privately.

At this point only my mom, my husband, I want to say my best friend and maybe my brother, they were the only ones that knew.

I kind of feel like everything that's happened since then is like post DNA surprise day and then everything that happened before that is pre DNA surprise day.

And I feel like I'm 2 completely different people from that day before the day.

And then after the day, even looking at pictures of myself prior to my DNA surprise, I just look like a completely different person in my eyes.

I think this goes back to my childhood, but my my whole life I've kind of felt like an inconvenience or a burden almost with my mom.

She had me as a a, she was a teenager and then she had my brother.

And then I kind of felt like we were both inconveniences and burdens to her.

So I think that that mindset plays a huge part.

In the beginning of my surprise, I didn't necessarily want to tell this other family that I existed.

At first, I kind of felt like I was going to blow up someone's life or just make someone else's happiness less happy.

And I think that has a lot to do with how I was feeling.

I wasn't happy.

I didn't.

I didn't understand how someone who I thought I trusted so much and that person as my mom, we were best friends.

I think up until this DNA surprise, it's kind of just made me question like, how could you look at me?

How could we do all these things together?

And it never got brought up once.

So it kind of changed how I viewed a lot of people.

So I got my results in July of 2021.

I kept it to myself from July to October.

Now with me keeping it to myself, I also didn't turn off my matches on Ancestry.

I kind of felt like if it was meant to be for like them to see me, that it was meant to be and I was just going to allow it.

So I kind of just was open to communication, but not necessarily like reaching out for it.

In October, I got a message from my half brother.

I matched with his sister and she had said, hey, my brother had noticed that you matched last night on Ancestry and he kind of wanted me to reach out and just see how we can all support each other.

My heart sunk.

I was like, Oh my gosh, they know about me.

And so far it's been OK.

But my whole thing was the way that I had to find out about it without nobody mentioned it, that it was a possibility beyond my dad saying at 15 that something was going to come up on my test.

And then even when I told my mom I took the test, she still didn't say like, hey, you might come across this or any kind of heads up.

None of that was given.

So I didn't want my biological father to find out through like a text message or I guess a roundabout way from my half brother or his sister or anything like that.

I wanted it just to be direct and kind of like how I felt I should have been told, but at the same time I didn't think that I would be able to sit and listen or see his reaction like his initial reaction to finding out.

So I had asked my mom to message him and she wanted to meet up in person.

So I think she messaged him that Wednesday and I'm pretty sure the next day or maybe even that Friday, they met up for breakfast.

I didn't attend.

It was just my mom and my biological father.

They were actually friends growing up.

Throughout high school they had the same friend group and my biological father's first wife with my half brother and his sister was my mom's friend in high school.

So like they all know each other.

I just don't think that they knew how the relationships were intertwined.

She went and met him and his initial reaction was shocked.

She said he was speechless, kind of just told her what he'd been up to since high school and she told him how I was.

Right after they met.

He added me on Facebook and messaged me immediately.

And we kind of had this awkward introduction through like Facebook Messenger of, hi, I'm Brittany, I'm your daughter.

What was that like?

It was very overwhelming.

I think I was happy.

It was huge for reaching out to him, talking to him the first time I found out that I not only had this half brother who I think he's four years younger than me, maybe 6, but I also had a little sister that I didn't know existed either.

She's currently 8.

And I actually now have a new little sister that was just born in May.

But he kind of was telling me about him and his life and the things that he's gone through and my little sister.

And he was open to meeting.

I think at first he was more open from the time that we virtually met, I guess on Facebook, where we acknowledge each other's existence.

It was actually seven months.

It was just like Facebook Messenger communication you.

I would check in and try to get some information out of him like, hey, where are you guys living?

You know, can we meet up?

I don't think he was comfortable with it at first.

I think it was a lot for him to take in.

In the last three years, I've kind of learned that he is a, he's a closed off person just because he's been through a lot.

But I think he's open to meeting me and like kind of understanding who I am, but it's a very slow process.

So we met at my half brother's baby shower.

That was the first time that we had actually met in person.

That was probably the most like core shocking rocking day of the entire event.

I think when we first locked eyes, me and my biological father, we look so much alike.

If I was bald and like 30-40 years older we would be twins.

So it was.

How did it?

Yeah, How was it?

I mean, that genetic mirroring is such an important piece.

How was it to see him?

It's so weird even to this day I find myself just staring at him when I'm around him because it is so weird to go from.

My mom has a huge family.

She had seven siblings and my dad's side.

I don't look like any of them.

And then at this baby shower that I was at where I first met him, most of their family is there as well and I look like a majority of them too.

So it was a extremely overwhelming day seeing all of these people looking at me and be looking at them and knowing something was off that was, I don't even have the words for it to be honest.

I didn't understand how there was some other people in the world that existed that looked like me that I didn't know.

Like the math couldn't math in my head, if that makes sense.

So from the time of my mom telling my biological father I existed to the baby shower, I kind of want to fill in that little gap.

I met my my half brother.

It was November 10th.

That's our sibling anniversary that we like to call it.

We went out to eat me, my husband, my half brother and his now wife.

It was just the four of us.

He was the first person that I met in person that we looked alike.

And so when he walked in, I was so anxious, so nervous.

And he walked in and he just looked at me and said, are we going to hug or what?

And I think that like every ounce of nervousness that I had just kind of washed away.

We sat there and talked for probably a good two hours.

The conversation was flowing.

It was not anything awkward.

It wasn't weird.

It felt like I was at the right place at the right time with the right people.

So I met my half brother, I met his daughter and then we kind of me, my husband, my half brother and his now wife.

We just started hanging out all the time.

We would do game nights, we would do dinner.

It was great getting to know them and kind of just hanging out.

And I feel like something that I have like a big regret about the DNA surprise is that I've kind of missed out on so many years with these people.

And so it's kind of like making up for lost time almost.

And so spent time with them.

We got really close.

I went to the baby shower.

And so when I'm walking into this baby shower, this is the first family event I'm attending.

I haven't met many family members outside of my half brother and his wife and his daughter.

My half brother had said that our biological father was coming to the shower and that wasn't the plan originally.

I wasn't anticipating meeting him there.

I wasn't prepared mentally at all.

He walked in and we kind of locked eyes and we kind of just nodded at each other.

We didn't speak, we didn't hug, we didn't do anything like that.

It was just kind of overwhelming, speechless.

And then all of his family walks in, his siblings, their kids, all a whole group of people.

And I quickly realized that none of them know who I am.

At first I had kind of sat off in the distance of the room not really intermingling with them because when this baby shower planning started, my biological father had reached out and said that he didn't think it would be appropriate for me to introduce myself to his side of the family at the shower unless we did adna test together.

Just for that extra confirmation.

That's what he explained it as.

This was something I had offered several times.

I was like, let's go do ADNA test.

Like I said, a big hurdle I had was these older generation people around me trying to get them to understand the DNA test and how it works so that me and my half brother matching on Ancestry wasn't proof enough somehow that he needed that additional confirmation and the paternal DNA test.

I think at first I was a little upset because I was like, OK, well we've been talking for months and now this is getting brought up, but I also kind of want to just get it over with because then it puts everyone's mind at rest.

So I went the very next day and paid for the DNA test and did my portion.

That was February 26th of 2022.

And then the baby shower rolls around and when you do a DNA test outside of Ancestry or 23andMe, they swab your mouth and then they put your swab in this little box and then they wait for the other person to come in to then match them.

They said I would get an e-mail when he came in and did his part.

Well, I never received an e-mail.

And then April rolls around and the baby showers here.

For me, something that I really had to put in place throughout this was that if something so important to me, I needed to do it without thinking of everyone else's feelings over my own feelings.

And it took a long time to get to that point.

But I think the baby shower was the first step in the right direction, where even though he had asked me not to go and not to introduce myself without the paternity test being done, I made the decision that since he didn't do it, I was going to go ahead and go to the baby shower.

I feel like I did my part of the ask, and so since he didn't want to do his part, I felt like the ask was no longer relevant.

So I went to the baby shower and I quickly realized that nobody else knew who I was, but they were kind of looking at me weird.

So probably about halfway through the baby shower my half brother sister came up to me and asked me if I wanted to be introduced to the rest of the family and I said no.

I knew that me being there was satisfying my want to be a part of their big day, but I didn't want to cross a hard boundary that he had set, so I had said no to meeting the rest of the family.

At the same time, my biological father had left and my half brother's sister decided that I was going to be introduced to them regardless of how I felt or how my biological father felt.

I saw her walk into this hallway and she had a couple of my biological father's sisters and cousins and nieces, and I think this is when they found out because they all kind of backed out of the hallway and just were staring straight at me.

I got really anxious at this point.

I think when you're telling people the information, like the newly found information, it is so stressful because you don't know if they're going to have a good reaction or a bad reaction or no reaction at all.

Is also kind of hard to understand, but just the staring straight at me made me very nervous.

My biological father, sister, my aunt, she came up to me and gave me a hug and she wanted me to meet the rest of family that was there.

And so I said, OK, sure, let's do this.

And how did it feel to be so welcomed and, and have her say, I, I want you to meet the rest of the family?

Like, was it surprising?

What kind of reaction were you really anticipating from all of these people?

I think it was surprising, especially I think I was basing like my expectations of their feelings and their reactions off of my biological fathers who had he had shown interest where he was like responding to messages, but we hadn't really met up until that point.

We he hadn't really put in any effort into getting to know me at that point.

So I was almost expecting that same kind of reaction when she hugged me.

I think I cried.

I was very emotionally overwhelmed.

It's so weird to have instant connections.

And I think that's something that I haven't really experienced prior to this.

Having this person that says I want to give you a hug and then 5 minutes later they're leaving and saying like, I love you, I'm glad to meet you.

It's, it's a surreal feeling and something I've never experienced before.

It felt supportive.

It felt like, OK, this whole thing might be OK.

Something else I was experiencing, not on the biological father side, but my maternal side and my lifelong father side, was a lot of anger and a lot of disappointment.

Maybe my mom knew, along with the rest of my family, my mom, my dad, both of all their siblings, my grandparents.

Apparently they all knew that my lifelong father was not my father, they just didn't know who was.

But for me, I didn't know for sure that he was not my lifelong father.

I had no clue.

So once I started going to, you know, baby showers and all of these things where kind of like the cat was out of the bag almost, I then had to tell the opposite sides of the family that, hey, I did this test and this is what I found out.

My original viewpoint was that not much will change, it will just be enhanced.

Like I'll just get additional people to love, but not much will change.

Like on the people that I knew my whole life, I started telling other people like my grandma and my dad's brother and his wife and my cousins, even people on my mom's side of the family that, hey, I found out this information.

And I know that my lifelong dad is not actually my dad and that I have this other biological father out here and I'm meeting all of these people.

What I wasn't expecting was the anger that came from it.

On my lifelong father's side, I got a lot of, well, why do you need a new family?

We're not good enough or you don't love us anymore.

Just very absurd things to get to from the information I was providing.

So I think when my biological father's sister gave me a hug at the baby shower, it was almost like a relief that like, it's going to be OK even if all these other people don't think it's OK.

And that's definitely been a huge theme of my journey.

Something I've learned along the way is that you can't make everyone happy and that it's impossible to make most of the people happy when you're trying to make yourself happy.

So after the baby shower, I kind of cut off contact with a lot of my family that was just being nasty and rude and had a lot of negative things to say about the whole thing and focused on just the people that were supportive.

I've, I actually started therapy then too.

That's been a huge part of my journey, kind of rewiring how I think, what I'm thinking and who I'm thinking about.

So that's been big.

Did you get into therapy immediately after?

Had you been in therapy before?

No, I'd never done therapy before.

I definitely should have if I'm being honest.

Prior to this, July 2021 is when I got my results.

I started therapy in November 2022.

So the baby shower had happened.

My nephew was born, my half brother had their baby.

Things were going great with those people that I was connecting with and talking with, and I think in November 2022, I hit this wall of sadness that I couldn't get out of where I think that the positive connections I was making, they were still going great.

But I think the overall negative reactions from all the other people, they started out weighing the positive reactions and I found it just really difficult to get through each day.

And that's when I decided to find a therapist.

Something I experienced as well was I, I couldn't look at mirrors for a very, very long time.

I got my results in July.

I don't think I looked in the mirror all of that following summer until probably that late fall like October or November ish.

Can you talk a little bit more about that because this is an experience that we hear about all the time.

Oh yeah.

How did you feel when you looked in the mirror?

Yeah, I think the best way that I can explain it is that you know that the FedEx truck, how if you look at it, there's like a arrow in the FedEx word of the logo.

And once you see that, you don't Unsee it.

And I think that that's how I kind of looked at myself.

Where once I saw myself and saw these other people that I looked like and my biological father, we look so much alike.

And it was confusion at 1st and then it was kind of just my face transformed.

Like once I saw my biological father, my face didn't look like it looked before.

I don't know how to like make that make sense, but it just looked different.

My nose, my eyes, my chin, all of these features that I had never really I guess paid attention to.

Maybe I was paying extra attention to because I was like, oh OK, we have the same nose, we have the same chin, we have the same eyes, even our fingers are the same.

For the 1st 26 years of my life I feel like I was looking at myself maybe not as deep as I should have been or like I couldn't see it.

And then once I did see it I couldn't Unsee it.

It just played tricks with my mind of like even in pictures or videos of anything it was like OK but the way you even talk is weird.

The way your nose is moving is different and maybe it just made me hyper analyze it even more because I was noticing all the differences.

But I think it was just a sadness of I don't recognize this person.

I don't recognize the way she looks.

I've obviously sat with it for three years now, and I've looked at myself in the mirror a lot since then.

And I know my face didn't physically change, like I didn't morph into something else.

But my viewpoint of myself and my viewpoint of my life changed so dramatically that I, I think that it was just me seeing a whole different person that I didn't know existed because I didn't know that like my origin and who I was was not the truth.

The mirror thing was the first thing I experienced for sure.

So much so I got a tattoo of a broken mirror because I, I think that when I first started going through this, and I think that therapy helped me get to this point, but I didn't realize how much power I gave to those things either.

And now I need to relearn who I am and kind of like teach myself who I am because I feel like I have these tools now I didn't have before that allow me to see things differently.

When I first in my therapy session, I was very skeptical.

I was nervous to talk.

I kind of felt like me talking about the scenario was betraying the other people in the scenario at first.

Once I got comfortable with my therapist and just realized that she was there to talk to me about my problems and not everyone else, I opened up more.

She had me write down everything that had happened, even my childhood up until now, to where at this point I had found out my results.

And at the end of it, she held up the paper and she said, does this look like a lot?

And I was like, yeah, it is.

And she was like, OK, it feels like a lot because it is a lot.

And I think that was the first time that someone had, like, actually acknowledged that, like, hey, this is a lot.

You're not crazy for feeling sad or overwhelmed.

It's not your fault.

And that was the first time that I think that someone had said that to me.

And I think that's when it all started changing.

I felt like I could open up to her.

I felt like even the things I wasn't sure about in the situation, I could talk to her about it and we could like work through it.

I still see her now.

What is next for you as you look ahead?

So the relationships have kind of all, like I would say, evened out to where I think that they're probably going to stay.

My biological father, we talk, he responds, I see him every so often.

We do birthdays, holidays and things together.

That's been huge.

I have two little sisters now.

I've never had sisters prior to this, so that was really changing.

My half brother, we're pretty close.

He has a daughter and a son, my first niece and nephew.

Biologically, I'm actually my nephew's godmother.

That was huge for me.

So things are going great.

I would say my biological father has never finished his part of the DNA test.

For a while.

It was something that bothered me.

It was something I pushed for and asked about, but I think we've kind of just come to the understanding that he knows that I'm his daughter and I know that he is my biological father.

Now.

Do I wish that he would take that test?

Probably, because I think that would just like provide closure to both of us.

With my other family, I've kind of met them where they meet me.

Some of them, they don't want to talk about it.

I don't bring it up.

Some of them do ask me questions and we talk about it regularly.

I just turned 30 this year in September and I had a birthday party and it was the first event that all sides of the families have been together.

My biological father couldn't make it.

He was out of town, but a lot of his family did show up and it was the most, I guess, complete I felt in a while with other people being in the same room.

I've had a lot of regrets throughout this process of should I have done this?

Should I have just let it stay where it was?

And I think overall I'm glad I did it because I found a lot of people that are great people that should have been in my life the whole time.

But I also think that it showed me the other people that maybe they weren't in my corner like I thought they were.

And so it's opened my eyes up to that for sure.

How are you feeling overall about your mom now?

Where do you think stand today?

That's a bit of a tough one.

There's two parts to it.

So my first part of frustration is that she didn't tell me that she didn't give me the heads up.

She didn't say, hey, there's a possibility, nothing.

I think that that betrayal knowing, knowing that I was going to be hurt and not doing anything proactively about it.

I think that it's something that I'm always going to have a problem with, something I'm always going to struggle with.

She was in denial at first.

She was very much, this isn't true.

I don't know why you did this.

It's it doesn't need to be talked about kind of thing.

And I think that she's very much still in the place of I did something wrong.

I'm sorry I did something wrong.

Where I'm at now is that I understand that it was wrong and I want to figure out a way to kind of move forward and for us to be on the same page.

And I don't think that she's there yet.

I think that she's still stuck on the decision she made when I was born.

I think if she could move past that and kind of acknowledge, hey, I did make this decision, but now you've know the truth and now you can make relationships with these people and be supportive of that, I think that we could make progress.

But I think I just have a lot of anger.

I have a lot of hurt.

I have a lot of frustration, especially because it wasn't just my mom that knew that my lifelong dad wasn't my dad.

It my lifelong dad also knew and my whole family knew.

And so I have a resentment that I, that I, I still have for her.

And I think it's, I've talked about it with my therapist that it's weird.

I don't resent my lifelong dad the same way I resent my mom, but I think that a lot of that goes to how she's treated me after the fact, after I got my results.

Going forward, I just want to be happy and keep discovering myself.

I feel like I still have so much more to learn about myself, so much more to learn about my biological family.

I'm just going to let time keep doing its thing and hopefully it heals the other people that are involved in the situation to where they can be a part of my life again and support me.

And I hope it continues to heal me.

And I'm just hoping that I can continue making relationships with the people that have opened up their arms with me.

What advice do you have for a parent who is keeping adna surprise from their child?

I've thought about this a lot.

I don't think that there's like a magic number where you hit this age and your parents should tell you all of their dirty secrets.

I think it's going to be different for every person, but for me, I think that it would have been easier to digest had I known prior to becoming an adult and trying to figure out who I was as a person.

Maybe as a high schooler, I might not have been as mature as I was at 26 to kind of take the information in the way I did.

But I feel like that kind of backtracking who you are as an adult is really hard.

There are certain things that you do as an adult.

I don't have children, but I have been, I've been married.

So like my wedding is a huge day that I will never get back.

And I think having my biological family, all of them there, it's a big regret I have now because it's something that I can't do again.

But like, if I had kids, I would want all of my family to be a part of that.

Or just any big thing.

You look back and you have regrets that they weren't able to be a part of that day when they should have been.

So I think that whenever your child is mature enough to take in something that's like that, I think that they definitely need to know.

This isn't just like, oh, this is my dad.

This is half of who I am.

And I think that for other people to know a secret about my truth and no one tell me, I think it caused way more hurt.

Than it should have parents that are making decisions.

I understand that you're you're doing it because you think it's the best decision at the time.

I've also heard that a lot of people never anticipated that DNA tests were going to become such easily accessible things.

But I think that something that I try to do is that whenever I make a decision, I have to know why I made the decision, and I have to be able to adjust if the things I decided on change.

I just think that everyone deserves to know who their family is, who their biological parents are, their siblings, their connections and chemistry, and just things that you don't even think of that that you deserve to have.

Honesty is the best policy and just let them know as soon as they're mature enough to know.

And what advice do you have for someone who just uncovered Adna surprise?

If you just uncovered your DNA surprise, I would say first of all be very patient with yourself.

Something I always tried to get to was my normal.

I try to get back to normal and I think that you have to 1st understand that your normal is no longer there.

You have to find your new normal and it takes a while to get there.

I would also say definitely look into therapy.

I never could see myself as someone going into therapy prior to this.

I think everyone could probably benefit from therapy to be honest.

I started outgoing weekly.

I then switched to bi weekly and now I'm at monthly.

So it's not something that you're tied to forever, it's just there when you need it.

And it's just helpful to have an unbiased person giving you their advice and their opinion on situations.

And then my last piece of advice would definitely be to put yourself first.

I spent a long, long time trying to walk on egg shells to make sure I wasn't offending anyone or making sure I wasn't hurting anyone's feelings or stepping on toes.

And the sad truth of it is that I don't feel like the people that had my secret, that didn't tell me until I found out, I don't think that they were worried about my feelings in those moments.

The people that have said the nasty comments and the nasty remarks, when I tell them my story, I don't feel like they're caring about my feelings in that moment.

So I need to make sure that I'm thinking about myself.

And as long as I'm being true to myself and honoring how I feel, then the people that truly support me will be there for me and will understand how I feel every single time I get sad, every single time I feel anything about this.

There are so many people out there that have experienced this that you need to be around those people.

Even listening to this podcast, I've listened to probably every episode.

There are support groups on Facebook.

There's so many different tools out there and resources that will make you feel not alone because it is probably the most lonely experience to go through.

It will always be a bit lonely.

I'm always going to be the outsider on all sides of the family.

I'm always going to be like the person that wasn't there the whole time and that is just popping in now.

But as long as you can put your feelings 1st and know that if this is what I feel to do, this is what I need to do, then in the end it will most likely come out the way you want it.

To.

Brittany, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing your journey.

I know that people who are listening who've been through similar experiences will be helped by you being vulnerable and sharing.

I hope that the future looks bright for you, whatever that looks like, whether it's building or repairing a relationship with your mom or continuing to build a relationship with your new found family.

I just wish you the best and thanks again for being here.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Thanks again to Brittany for sharing her story.

If you have Adna Surprise that you'd like to share, please submit your story at dnasurprises.com.

And if you'd like early add free access to episodes, join me over on patreon@patreon.com/DNA Surprises.

Until next time.

This episode of DNA Surprises was hosted, produced and edited by me Alexis Ourselt.

It was mixed and mastered by Josh Ourselt of Siren Recording Studios.