When the DNA surprises happen or NPE, a lot of times the child is
pretty angry with the mother for the lying and the sneaking
around and keeping the secret. And for me, I get that.
I, I understand that. But I also would ask for grace
because sometimes when those things happen, those decisions
are made in the moment, in the survival mode moment, and you
really are not thinking, okay, what's going to happen 20 years
from now? Is this child going to be asking
questions? Is there going to be such a
thing as rapid DNA tests that everybody is going to be taking?
Those are things that never ever crossed my mind at the time.
I was just in full blown survival mode and like I said,
going through a breakup of a volatile relationship and just
really did not know what my future looked like.
But I knew at that time that I could not care for a.
Child, welcome to DNA Surprises, a podcast that delves into the
world of unexpected DNA discoveries.
I'm your host Alexis, our salt. 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, intergenerational trauma.
It's something we talk about a lot here.
The most common cycles. We discuss our patterns around
keeping secrets and patterns around shame.
In this week's episode, you will hear a story about a cycle of NP
ES. When Bobby became pregnant with
her third child, she knew that she was not in a position to
care for another baby. She relinquished her child to a
family member, but kept the specific circumstances around
the birth a secret. Most people thought she was a
surrogate. Just a couple of years later,
Bobby was shocked when, long before consumer DNA testing, she
learned that the man she'd believed was her biological
father was not, and that both of her parents knew this secret her
entire life. And then there was one more
years later when she took a consumer DNA test, Bobby
uncovered that her mother is also an NPE, upending another
long believed story. I want to thank Bobby for being
open about her experience, especially as a mother in this
situation. She shares a vulnerable, honest,
and empathetic perspective for all of us to consider.
Thank you Bobby for sharing your story.
My name is Bobby and I live around the San Antonio, TX area
and I will be 57 this month. The first one in my family was
that, and I'm going to be quite frank here, I got married when I
was 18, very young and my ex-husband was an alcoholic and
a serial cheater and I could blame my actions on that, but I
feel like I've matured enough to where I can own it.
I sought the company companionship of a colleague and
that year and a half relationship ended up with me
being pregnant. My ex-husband and I had broken
up six times. I've taken back five out of
those six. We were actually legally
divorced when I turned to someone else, But we were living
together, and so it was a difficult situation.
But he had already told me that he was going to leave again
right before I found out that I was pregnant.
So I was going through a really messy breakup, one that I knew
was permanent at that time. But also, I had two children and
I was trying to finish my college degree.
And I think it was just kind of the perfect storm that when I
found out that I was pregnant, he was already packing his
things to leave. And so then I was thinking to
myself, I'm pregnant, I'm going to school, I'm working, I have
two kids, I'm breaking up with my partner.
What do I do? What do I do now?
So a family member had approached me a couple of years
prior and asked me if I would consider being a surrogate.
I told them no at the time because obviously I had a lot of
things going on and it wasn't something that I had even would
even consider. When I found myself pregnant, I
honestly had no idea what I was going to do because I could
barely financially take care of the two kids that I had.
And I knew that I could not financially and probably
emotionally care for another child, if I'm being honest.
And so I went back to the family member and I said, is it
important that the child be biologically yours?
Because I'm pregnant and I don't know what I'm going to do.
And so they said they would take the child.
And so when the baby was born, I put her husband's name on the
birth certificate as the child's father.
It was just something that we'd all agreed to and we thought it
would make it easier down the road for the adoption to take
place. And it did it.
It made it much easier. At that point, did you know who
the father of the child was? Did you know that it was not
your ex-husband or was versus the person that you'd had a
relationship with? Well he had had a vasectomy.
Ex-husband had had a vasectomy 8 years prior.
So I was and still to this day probably 95 to 100% sure that it
was the person that I had a relationship with.
OK, that it was that person's child.
Are your children that you already had?
How old were they? 11:00 and 8:00.
OK, so do they remember then you being pregnant and and what
happened? Yes, my daughter was 11, my son
was 8. And what they knew and what they
were told was what we told everyone, that I was just being
a surrogate for the family member.
And so that's what they grew up leaving.
I do have regrets. I do have problems now with the
way that we handled it back then, just simply because what
you know in the future is not what you know in the past.
So it makes a big difference in the decision section.
Absolutely. And I want to say first of all,
that I really respect and appreciate your bravery with
coming forward to talk about this because there is a lot of
shame and stigma and anger towards towards mothers often in
this situation. And I know when you reached out
to me, that's part of of why you wanted to share your
perspective. So I really just want to thank
you for your vulnerability with this.
At the time that you made your decision, were you thinking
about what the child might feel like about, you know, not
knowing who their biological mother was or what stories, I
guess, were you telling yourself about maybe how the child would
feel? I was not thinking about that.
I'll be honest. I was not thinking about what is
this child going to think 15 or 20 or 30 years down the road?
Are there going to be questions? Who's going to answer those
questions? It really was in the very back
of my mind. I will say this, I did tell the
person that I was having a baby and that the baby was his.
And he said he didn't want anything to do with it.
And I said, OK, I'm going to give this baby up for adoption
basically. And he said, OK, fine, just
don't ever contact me again. And, and I didn't.
So that person is aware that they have a child out out there
in the world. What they do or or how they feel
about it now, I don't know because I haven't spoken to them
in 25 years. OK, so you, you were really in a
situation where you are not supported from either your
ex-husband or the person that you'd have the relationship with
and like you said, really in that survival mode when you made
your choice. Yes.
OK, So what happens next? You have the baby and you give
the baby to your family member. My family member who actually
lives in my same town. And so a lot of people that I
worked with, there were people that came up to me and suspected
that it wasn't the way we were telling it.
And so I had a lot of, you know, there were rumor mills.
Everything's going around, you know, and I protected the
identity of the person that I was with.
And in some ways I look back on that and I'm like, why did I do
that? Why did I take it all on, you
know, when it takes two, really. But that's just the way that it,
it happened. We're in the same town with a
family member. I see the family member a lot.
I see the child a lot. And it's painful.
It's painful to see that decision that you made and just
wonder, OK, did I make the right decision?
Should I have changed it? You know what, what should I
have done? And then about 2 1/2 years
later, I finally finished college.
I've bought a home for me and my two children.
I feel like things are kind of looking up, like finally I've
gotten out of the dark clouds. Not that I've forgotten about my
decision because it's always in the back of my mind, but I felt
like I could live with it a little bit better it I guess.
I told myself, look, it's done. What's done is done and there's
nothing you can do now. You can't change it.
You can just live with it. Even though I will tell you that
20 something years of guilt was there, it was there for a long,
long time. How often would you say that you
thought about it? I'm not going to say daily.
I think that's overkill because again, I was still and back then
we didn't have online classes. So I'm going to work all day.
I'm going to school two or three nights a week.
I'm trying to take care of my kids.
I'm doing a lot of things. I'm trying to stay busy.
But I will say this, I did see a therapist and the therapist told
me that what I was doing, going to work, going to school,
running around, a lot of that was just so that I wouldn't face
who I was, my identity, the decisions that I made, things
that had happened to me. And I look, I, I was kind of
angry about that at first because I was like, no, I'm
going to school so I can better myself and get a better job for
my kids and, you know, all these things.
But I think there was a probably a grain of truth in that, that I
tried to stay busy so that I wouldn't think about what I had
done honestly. Did you see the child often?
You said you were kind of in the same town.
You were in the same town. And yes, I did.
And I wouldn't say often, but every couple of months I did.
So it was difficult during those times.
Like I said, about 2 1/2 years later, I graduated from college
on a Saturday morning, super excited that I was done with
that and ready to embark on, you know, a new chapter with my
children and finally gotten my ex out of my system and we're
ready to move on with our new lives.
And Tuesday evening comes and I get a phone call from my ex
mother-in-law and she lived up in Illinois at the time I lived
in Oklahoma. And she was adamantly
apologizing to me. I said what what happened?
And she said I accidentally opened her mail.
I'm thinking who would send me a letter to my mother-in-law up in
Illinois? You know, it just seemed odd to
me. I said, what do you mean?
And she said, well, it was rainy, and the ink had smeared
on the envelope. And so the mail people put it in
a plastic bag, and all I could read was the last name.
And of course, we had the same last name at the time.
And she said, I thought it was my letter, so I opened it.
But now I realize it was for you.
Do you want me to mail it to you?
And I said, no, you can just read it to me.
It's OK. So she read me a letter from a
girl named Tina. Tina said that she was my sister
and that we shared a biological father.
Now, this is May of 2000, and we kind of went back and forth for
probably over an hour with me arguing with her that there's no
way that we're sisters, there's no way that we share a father,
that, you know, my dad's on my birth certificate and he's been
my dad my whole life. I got pictures of me as a baby.
He's holding me as a baby. So you're wrong.
You're absolutely wrong. And she proceeds to tell me the
name of my mother, my grandparents, where they lived,
my birthday, a lot of things about me that just a stranger
from somewhere else would not know.
She faxed me some pictures of a man that's in a military
uniform, he's about 21 in the picture, and then some pictures
of me as a baby that some of them I had never even seen but I
knew they were me. I asked her where she got them
and she said that she got them from our father.
I asked my mother if there was any chance at all that my dad
was not my dad and she denied it.
She said no, that's absolutely untrue.
Who told you that? Who started that rumor?
It was a big long thing with her.
And so the next day when I had got those pictures in the fax, I
drove over to her office. Her office was literally like 3
buildings from my office at the time and I asked her to come out
to my car with me and she did. And I think she knew what I was
going to ask her because I had called her the night before in
in my mind it was just ludicrous.
There's just no way that this girl is right.
And so I wish that I would have driven to my mother's house and
actually looked her in the face when I asked her the question.
She came out to the car with me and I had his picture face down
on my dashboard and I showed it to her and I just said I have
one question. Is this man my father?
And she just burst out in tears. You don't understand.
It's too hard to come to
explain. It's complicated.
You just don't get it. You don't understand.
He left me. He left us.
He left me. He left.
I mean, she just kept saying that over and over.
And so then I said, I get it. He left.
He left us. He left you.
He left me, he left us. I get that part.
But what I don't get is why I never knew about him until right
now. How I never knew this man even
existed. How is that possible?
And you are about 32 years old at this time. 32, yes, 32.
And this is just a couple of years after the baby.
OK. What are you thinking at this
time? I mean, this is wild to process.
You've had so many things happen just in the last few years.
How are you feeling? Devastated.
I actually wrote a book about it.
It's called Descended Deception and I changed names and places
and all of that. But in the book I really
describe how I go to the fax machine and get the pictures and
once I see his face, I know immediately that he's my
biological father. And I go into the ladies room
and I just vomit. I mean, I just, I'm physically,
I'll the reason why it's not because the man who raised me
was such a horrible person because he wasn't never let on
the entire time that that he raised me, that he was not my
dad. His mother was a horrible,
horrible person. She knew that I was not his
biological child and she treated me as such growing up.
And so to go through all that torment growing up, it was it
was a horrible, it was a horrible thing.
And I was angry with my mother for making me go through that
when I had a real grandmother that could have been different.
Those were the things that were going through my mind.
I went home sick from work and it was just devastating at the
time. I can't even tell you the
whirlwind. I mean, unless you've been
through it yourself, it's just hard to describe how it feels to
know that you are not who you thought you were.
Yeah. All the family research that
you've done on a family that's not yours, all the cousins and
the aunts and uncles and relatives that you have grown up
with your entire life are not yours.
They're not yours to claim. And I had two younger sisters.
My, my sister that's closest to me.
We're only 22 months apart because what had happened was my
mom got married at 17. I was born on her 18th birthday.
And then when I was two months old, he left.
He went back to Tennessee, where he was from, because he was in
the Army, and my mother married the man I called Dad when I was
eight months old, who was within six months.
She got remarried. She was married to him until I
was 28 years old. They got divorced and then she
got remarried. So when I found out, she had
already been divorced from him. Obviously he already knew.
Did he want to raise you as his own?
Was that something they agreed upon together?
I don't know because neither one of them would talk to me about
it after the fact. I went to my dad and I, I told
him. I said, hey, I just want to let
you know that I have found out the truth.
I know that you're not my biological father.
And you know what he said to me? Who started that rumor?
Oh, wow. And I said dad.
I said dad, I know it's the truth.
You don't have to lie anymore. And then he just didn't want to
talk about it anymore. No, no.
Wow. So you find this out way before
you know, the consumer DNA testing.
You find out kind of through this really abrupt way that
implies that a lot of people knew something about you before
you knew this about yourself. And I have to wonder in light of
the child that you relinquished for adoption, were you thinking
about them through any of this and and kind of how maybe it was
a similar experience to your own?
Yes, I was, because that experience that I had kept me
from being so angry at my mother.
I will tell you that we never really sat down and had a
discussion about it. In fact, she was pretty angry
with me when she found out that I drove all the way up to
Missouri in 2018 to meet my biological father because in her
mind, that chapter's closed. So we're done with that.
We've moved on. So there was a lot of anger
towards her for that, but I had to keep reminding myself, you
know, hey, you did it, too. It's not like you can be really
mad about this, you know? So my mom and I are in a pretty
good place now. But again, she doesn't really
like to talk about it. She doesn't like to go to the
past. So you said in 2018 you decided
to meet your biological father. That's how many years between
when you find out to when you meet him.
It's 1818. 18 years, What are you doing during that time?
So what had happened was I decided to meet my sister.
We met halfway in Tunica, Mississippi and we spent a four
day weekend. It's Presidents Day weekend and
actually to this day we will meet in different cities on
Presidents Day weekend. I love that and vacation
together just because that's where we first met.
It's just something that we do because we live so far away from
each other. We don't see each other on a
daily basis. We text, we talk, we message, we
send each other gifts. We are getting closer.
In the past 24 years we've gotten closer.
But during that 18 year time frame, I asked her to give me
his phone number so that I could call him and we talked 2 times
and both times he was drunk. I mean he was like very
inebriated and so I told him I would like to have a
relationship with you but only if you're sober you know?
Keep in mind this is the exact same time that my ex-husband is
calling me drunk telling me you're the only person I've ever
loved. I still have your picture in my
wallet. I want us to have a
relationship. Then I'm getting calls from bio
dad saying almost the exact same things.
I've always loved you. I still have your picture in my
wallet. I never forgot about you.
So it was, it was kind of traumatic for me, but in a sense
I wanted to stand my ground and be like, OK, I don't mind having
a relationship with you, but we're going to be sober.
You're not going to call me drunk.
You're not going to be disrespectful.
And because his whole thing was, oh, your grandmother ran me off.
I would have been, I would have came back, but she ran me off.
She said she didn't want me around and this and that.
And I'm like, OK, well, dispense with the excuses because I I
have them too. I can make every excuse in the
book for any decision or action I've taken, but just stop with
all the nonsense and call me when you're sober.
And he never called me again in that 18 years.
In fact, he'd had a stroke. And his sister was constantly
calling me. She was leaving me messages
telling me that she was going to give me power of attorney over
him, I needed to come and get him out of the nursing home,
those kinds of things. And I'm thinking to myself,
you've got a lot of nerve. Like, I've never even met this
man, and now I'm going to take care of him.
I don't think so. So his version of events is that
he left but then wanted to come back, but your grandmother ran
him off. And your mom's version of
events, well, you think you aren't 100% sure 'cause she
won't really talk about it. But what you've pieced together
is that he left and abandoned your mom and you, and therefore
she went and married somebody else who raised you as his own.
Do you have any sort of sense of where the truth might be in all
of that? I think it's pieces of each of
it. I really honestly believe that
when he got out of the Army, he did intend to go to Tennessee
and get a job and send for us. What he had said was he had sent
letters, and my mother claims she never received any letters
from him and maybe they were intercepted by my grandmother.
I don't know. But what I do know is that if
you know that you have a child out there and you truly want to
be in that child's life, then you could have made an effort.
We still lived in the same town until I was nine years old.
We never moved from that same town until I was 9.
So I think, I think that there could have been maybe another
way to reach out. In fact, because it was 2000,
before social media, before the, you know, DNA test, before all
these things were going on, the way that my sister found me was
a private investigator. She hired a private investigator
to find me. So it could have been done.
I think it could have been done. Yeah, yeah.
And if you were in the same place, that makes sense.
OK. Do you end up?
Meeting him, yes. So it just so happened that my
husband had, we have a Hot Wheels Camaro 2013 version and
it was the pace car at the Indianapolis 501 year.
And so in the summer of 2018, they had invited all of the
owners of Hot Wheels Camaros to come out there and run the
track. So we were driving up to
Indianapolis that summer. Anyway, that was already in the
plans. And so when she called me and
told me that he had had a stroke and he was in the nursing home
and you know, dire straits, something's going to happen.
I called my husband and I said, hey, is there any way that we
could just do a jog over to Missouri on our way to
Indianapolis? And he was like, what?
And I said, well, I got a call that my bio dad and we called
him Ron. We didn't, I didn't call him dad
or father or whatever. You know, it was either bio dad
or Ron. That was what we called him and
I said I got a call that he's in the nursing home and I don't
know his condition, but I kind of feel like if I don't go, I'll
regret it. And honestly, the whole time
that we were married, which we got married in 2002, he was
telling me the same thing. He's like, I don't want to push
you, but I do feel like if you don't make some kind of effort
to at least meet him, that's you're going to regret it one
day. And so we kind of squeezed in
the trip to the nursing home in the middle of Missouri in our
vacation plans. And so we did.
We went to the nursing home and I don't know how to describe the
meeting. It was surreal in a lot of ways
because I'm looking at this little old man and I'm like, I
think you got a ton of regrets. I really do think he did.
I brought a photo album with me and he was looking through the
pictures. I have a granddaughter that has
red hair like I do. And he he would point to it and
he would point to me because he couldn't speak.
And I said, yes, I've been told she looks like me.
He had tears running down his face.
And I'm going to tell you that I really believe that this man had
so many regrets because, like I said, we make decisions that we
make, and we don't think about the future.
We don't think about what's going to happen 20 or 30 or 50
years from now. We just don't.
Yeah. So I'm thankful that I got 20
minutes. I saw him.
I don't know him. I don't know if the drinking was
something that started after he left my mom or if it was
something he was always going to be doing or I really don't know.
But I will say this, my sister didn't know him either because
once he left my mom, he got married to my sister's mom and
when my sister's mother said she was pregnant, he left.
So my sister's mother remarried and I had the baby and her
husband's name was on her birth certificate also.
So we were both raised believing that our dads was somebody
different. Wow, that is so much to
navigate, not only from your own personal experience, but then
that happening to you and then happening to your sister.
Yes. Did that time that you spend
with him resolve anything for you?
I think it did. I think that for me, it didn't
really show me who he was or why he did what he did, but it
allowed me the chance to tell him that I forgave him.
Wow, thank you for sharing that. I started writing my book in
2018 and we started doing DNA testing through Ancestry and my
book. I put it on Amazon in 2020,
hired a writing coach from Houston, and what I would do is
during my lunch period, I'd bring my lunch, my sandwich or
whatever, and then I'd go out to my car and I would call her and
she would record some of our sessions and she became my
therapist. I'm not kidding.
She it was not a job that she signed up for at all, but going
through it and using her as my writing coach and writing about
my experience actually was so good for me.
It really was. I wrote under a pseudonym.
All the names are changed to protect all of us guilty ones.
But it was so good to get it out because I had kept it in for so
long. My mom didn't really like to
talk about it. I couldn't really talk about it,
you know, with my kids. I mean, I don't really have
anybody that I could just vent to or whatever.
In 2021, I set my daughter down and told her about what
happened, about what really happened.
I gave her a copy of the book. I said, you don't have to read
it, but I hope that you do because I think it will give you
a better idea of what happened, what really happened.
And she read it. We sat down and talked about it,
and then I talked to my son about it.
I really felt like this was a secret that I'd kept for years
and years and that at some point, some way, somehow, it was
going to come out and I would really rather them hear it from
me than someone else. And as it turned out, that's
what happened. What was their reaction My.
My daughter was really upset with me at first.
She was like, mom, how can you give up a kid?
How could you do that? Because she has, she had two
children at the time and they have since fostered and adopted
a baby. And I just told her.
I said, well, you are in a loving relationship with your
husband. They dated for four years.
They've been together for 20 years now.
I said you don't know what that's like to be in a
relationship like I was with your father.
Their father passed away 20 years ago from his drinking and
so he will forever be the the hero in their eyes.
And there's nothing I could say or would say to change their
minds. However, they do know that he
had a drinking issue and that's, I mean, he passed away when he
was 39 years old. So they know that.
And so I told her, I said, your husband doesn't even drink,
doesn't go to bars. You, you know where he is every
night he comes home to you and the kids.
That's not how it was for me. And again, not an excuse, but
just painting a picture of what it was like at that time in my
life. Yeah, they came to understand
that, you know, you make decisions.
Like I said, you make decisions in their your survival mode.
You do what you think you is best with the information you
have at the time. And I live with that guilt for
20 years. That child will be 25 in
November. And they know that I'm their
biological mother now. And it's all out in the open.
Everything's out. And how did they come to find
out? So the family member got
divorced and then got remarried and shared that with their new
husband. And the new husband told
everybody in the family, he said, that he thought everyone
already knew and that really was not the case.
And in fact, my two sisters did not know.
My one sister took it upon herself to call my children to
tell my children about that, which like I said, thankfully I
had already told them so they knew.
And how did your child receive that information?
The one who was raised by another family member.
I think that that child was already going through some
identity issues and had some questions and unbeknownst to me
because when I got remarried, I married a military member and we
moved to Texas. So when I moved away, that child
was like three, 3 1/2 years old. And so I was not around anymore.
And it for me, it was out of sight, out of mind.
The guilt was always there. The the emotion for me was
always there. But I didn't have to see that
child every day and I didn't see that child grow up.
So it was to me in my mind, better for me to not even be in
that town anymore. But from what I understand, the
pieces fell into place for that person also the way they did for
me when I found out. And we've actually had
conversations. They don't, you know, obviously
don't refer to me as mom or mother or whatever, but they are
aware that I am their biological mother.
And we've had conversations. And I've also said I'm not going
to be like my mother was. I'm going to be open and honest
about what happened. So if you ever have questions or
you want to know anything, I'm here and I'm going to be open
about it. And they asked me the name of
their biological father and I gave that to them.
As far as I know, they've not reached out to try to find that
person. And like I said, they haven't
really asked me a lot of questions.
I think it was just a matter of there was they had questions
growing up about how things were and kind of suspected that the
people that raised them were not their biological parents.
And then when the truth came out, I guess the pieces felt
into place and it made more sense to them.
So I don't feel anger from that person.
I don't feel like they're upset with me.
In fact, not really asked a lot of questions, but it's only been
about a year, year and a half since they found out.
So I'm going to assume that once they process the information,
they may have questions later on.
And that's OK. I'm open to them and I'm going
to be 100% honest. Wow.
Well, it's, it's unfortunate, you know, that they found out
the way that they did, but very fortunate that they have someone
to talk to who can answer questions for them.
During that time we were taking DNA tests and we were.
It was a fun thing because to me most of the secrets were already
out, so nobody had anything to hide.
It was, it was just to see how much Irish we really had or how
much Scottish we really had or you know, those kinds of things.
My son-in-law is Italian and so how much of my granddaughter's
got Italian or, or my Irish or Scottish, you know, because one
of them has brown hair and one of them has red hair.
And it was just kind of a fun thing we were doing.
And even my grandmother said she wanted to do it, so she did it.
So my daughter, my mother and my grandmother and I, we were going
through all these DNA matches and really it was kind of like a
hot, it was a hobby because I'm still working.
And we were just kind of doing it on the side and just here and
there we were finding out matches.
And my mother has a sister and her sister's daughter, which is
my first cousin, She and I matched in, in ancestry.
And I called her and I said, Hey, I see that you're an
ancestry. You were matched da, da, da.
You know, it was, it was fun. And then I started matching with
people that I had no idea who they were.
I was like, who are these people?
And I matched with a person who had more DNA than I did with my
first cousin. I'm like, how is that possible?
And so I started researching that and trying to figure out
who these people were. And I will tell you this, my
grandmother passed away in May of 2021.
We called her nanny. She was, she was the matriarch
of her family. And then in June of 2021, I got
a phone call from that match's mother.
And we pieced it together that my mother's biological father
was not who we thought it was. So for the past three years I've
been researching to find out who he really was.
And what have you found? I found out that my grandmother
was a waitress in Louisiana in 1948.
How she got there, I have no idea, but it was a little place
called the City Cafe. It was a diner, and it was right
across from the railroad. And so when the soldiers were
called up for the draft for World War 2, they would come and
sit on the bench waiting for the train, and the owner of the
diner would send her out with plates of food to feed them
because he knew that a lot of them didn't have any money.
They were hungry, and some of them weren't going to come home.
I don't know how she met the man who is my mother's father, but
that's how she met the man that I know is my Pawpaw.
He was stationed at Fort Bliss. He went over there to get some
of the soldiers, and he was also there to guard a plane crash
because he was a military police at the time.
The next thing I know, she's taking a train over to El Paso.
My mother was born in El Paso. She's married to him and they
were married for a long time. They were married, I don't know,
50 years. So I'm not really sure.
I'm trying to piece together, you know, how she ended up in
Louisiana and then how she ended up in El Paso.
But I have narrowed it down to three brothers and the older one
was in the military and he was not in the town at the time, so
we ruled him out. The middle brother was in the
town, but he was married and of course that doesn't mean
anything. But the younger brother was one
year older than her, and he was a traveling drug salesman.
And at the time, the diners were also drug stores.
And so in my mind, I'm picturing this guy coming into the diner
to sell drugs to the drugstore and meeting my grandmother, who
was a waitress in there. Why she didn't end up marrying
him, why she ended up marrying the guy that was in the
military, I don't know. So it's a mystery that I'm still
working on, but I'm pretty sure it's the youngest one that was
my mom's father. And does your mother know this?
Yes. And how does she feel about it?
Well, she wants to go with us to Louisiana next summer so we can
meet some of her relatives. Some of all of the brothers are
deceased. And the brother that I think it
is, he had a son who is also deceased.
So the only way that we're going to really find out is if his two
children, who are about my age, he has a son and a daughter, and
if they would take the Ancestry DNA test.
I've reached out to them on Facebook, but I haven't got a
response from either one of them.
But I'm hoping that at some point one of them reaches out to
me so that we can get them to take a test to be 100% sure that
their grandfather is my grandfather.
Wow. I mean we talk a lot on this
podcast about generational cycles, generational trauma, and
in this case, in your story, we have like 3 very concrete
examples. What has been your sort of
learning or like just overall observation and kind of seeing
how in some ways history repeated itself over 3
generations in your family? So what I've learned is that my
grandmother got pregnant by someone.
My theory is that his family came from money.
They were politicians, they had mansions in Louisiana.
They were their name was really big over there.
I think that it's either he was told or he knew that he would
not be able to marry a woman who was a waitress and basically an
orphan at that time. So she found a soldier to marry,
and that soldier took care of her for decades.
And so when my mother got married, my grandmother signed
off for her to get married to a soldier when she was 17.
And then when he left, he was gone.
Then she found another soldier for her to marry.
And in fact, my aunt also married several soldiers.
And when I was in high school, my mother pushed for me to marry
a military man. Ironically, I did eventually
marry one, and both of my sisters are married to military.
That's so interesting. I think that my grandmother
viewed our Papa. That's what we call him.
I think she viewed him as her savior.
Here she was 1948 pregnant, which was a huge no no back
then. This soldier said, I'll marry
you. I'll, I'll marry you.
And he he knew that she was pregnant with another man's baby
and still married her and took care of her for decades.
And so in my nanny's mind, my daughters and my granddaughters
need to marry the military because that's what'll take care
of them. Yeah.
And do you, do you feel like you share that in any way?
No, I'm too much of A feminist. I will tell you that I no, not
at all. I have 5 granddaughters and I
believe that I instill in all of them the necessity to take care
of themselves. I teach them all, you know, do
not ever rely on a man, whether he's in the military or whether
he's the president or wherever, whoever he is, do not rely on a
man. You get your own career, you
make your own money, you take care of yourself.
That's just something that I've been instilling in them because
my experience is I married a man that did not take care of me.
And in fact, when I got remarried, my husband, he said
to me, well, get married to me and I'll take care of you.
And I said, no, no, no, that is not going to happen.
That's not how we roll. He's been retired from the
military for a long time. In fact, he's had another career
since then. I will retire from being a
federal civilian in the next three years.
I've been working my whole life and I plan to always be able to
take care of myself. Even though we've been married
for 22 years. I don't think he's going
anywhere, but I just feel like I learned my lesson young that you
just can't rely on people. You just have to take care of
yourself. So I would never encourage my
granddaughters to marry or marry the military or, you know,
whatever. I I would just encourage them to
take care of themselves and be their own savior.
Yeah. Well, good for you and good for
you for being a cycle breaker on that.
As you look ahead, what are some of the things that you hope for,
either for your own children or your grandchildren like you
said, or for your own relationships with your mother
or new found family members? Well, I hope that I have been a
stable person in my grandchildren's lives so that
they ever find themselves in a situation where they don't know
what to do, that they feel like they could come to me and talk
to me and talk it out. Maybe if I had, if I had someone
that was the calm in the storm, maybe things would have been
different. Maybe the decision would have
been different. I don't know.
But I feel like I need to be that person for my children and
my grandchildren. And like you said, to break that
cycle because I feel like somehow it started with my
grandmother and I may never know the truth.
I've been, I've been digging, I've been trying to look up
clues, but I may never know the truth of why she didn't marry
that man and why she married the other man.
I, I may never know why. But when I look back on the past
and some of the things that were said and some of the things that
I was around with my grandmother and my mother and my aunt, I see
those puzzle pieces falling into place.
Like OK, I see now why this happened or those things were
said. I understand that now, whereas I
did not understand it at all when I was younger.
And, and again, this is not a a Dick for my grandmother because
I don't judge. I am in no position to judge
anyone for anything. I just want to understand what
happened. My grandmother's mother passed
away when she was 12 years old right in front of her, and then
her father ran off. So she was essentially an orphan
at 12. So my research right now is
trying to figure out how does she get from Mississippi down to
Louisiana? There was a seven-year gap, but
I don't know what happened to her.
And so I'm just trying to figure out that and try to understand
that, but also with some grace because I cannot judge her for
what decision she made in 1949 when my mother was born.
I just, I just can't. And it's not about trying to
figure out what she did wrong. It's really not.
I just really want to understand my grandmother.
And. What happened to her when she
was younger? Yeah, I think you have such a
unique perspective being on both sides of it and also being, you
know, kind of downstream from it.
And you have so much compassion and empathy for, for everyone
involved. And I I hope you have that for
yourself, too. I'm learning.
What advice do you have for a parent who is keeping adna
surprise from their child? My advice would be to tell them.
And I say that because I wish my mother would have sat me down
and told me what happened. I wish she would have told me
the truth. It was shocking to find out from
a stranger. I just basically turned my life
upside down. And the reason I say sit down
and tell it because we have so much advances in technology
these days, DNA testing, all these things going on, that the
likelihood of that secret coming out is pretty good.
It would be better coming from you, it really would.
What advice do you have for someone who just uncovered their
own DNA surprise? Feel your feelings.
I am in a couple of groups on Facebook and I've seen people
post things like I'm so mad, I'm so angry, but I can't express
that. Yes, you can.
Yes you can. You can express that anger.
You can express being upset. You can't express all of your
feelings because you are entitled to them.
I know for me, I held back a little bit because I felt like,
oh, I can't really be mad at my mom for something I did.
But the truth is I could be, I could be mad at her for a minute
because she lied to me. And you know, I felt like, well,
I lied, so how could I be mad? But those were two separate
issues. They really are.
I'm not mad at my mom. I'm not mad at my grandmother.
I'm not mad at anybody right now.
But there was a time when I was mad, but I felt like I had to
keep it in like I felt like I couldn't share that with
anybody. And I feel like when you do
that, you're diminishing your own worth.
Your feelings are worthy. So if you're mad or you're upset
or you're PAD, you're having an identity crisis because trust
me, you will feel it and feel it out loud.
Do that. Do that for yourself because I
think that everybody's entitled to their feelings.
Bobby, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and
sharing your story. It is such a journey that you've
been on. And again, I just, I really
appreciate your vulnerability and coming on and sharing the
mother's perspective as well as your own experience as you've
navigated your DNA surprise. And I wish you nothing but the
best in the future and look forward to reading your book.
Thank you so much for having me on.
I appreciate you letting me have the opportunity to tell my
story. Thanks again to Bobby for
sharing her story, and thanks again to all of the guests who
joined me for Season 9, including past guests who joined
me to share updates. We're going to take a short
break for the holidays, but I'll be back after the new year with
brand new DNA Surprise stories. And remember, join me over on
Patreon for early access to ad, free episodes, bonus content,
and more. 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, Siren Recording Studios.