DNA: Do Not Assume

(Part Two): Coming Out of The Desert - The Past Five Years. How were yours?

As a quick reminder… how Part 1 ended:

….Did you know there are surprises in the desert? I know because I have just experienced it. At the beginning of the year I prayed that God would surprise me. I really did. I used those words. May I tell you now, that if you should ever take on this prayer… that God will be ever-faithful in the answering of it.

It all began last Christmas… with a DNA test. By January of this year (2024), God was rolling out the red carpet of surprises….

(You might want to remind yourself of this story. before continuing below.)

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DNA: DO NOT ASSUME

If you’ve been following from the start you probably know my story (or you’ve caught up in that link above). In short, at nine I found out unceremoniously that my mother was my grandmother and my sister was my mother. Take a sec. Read it again. Having been raised by one who was raised by the parents of the “Greatest Generation” (i.e. the depression), it was already built into the bones that there wouldn’t be much talk about it. “Whys” be damned! Questions will be, ahem, tolerated… meaning they won’t be tolerated at all. So ask away! But don’t expect much.

In my musical, Hushabye, that I’m currently developing, there’s a song that each character sings called I Have Questions. Now you understand why. Incidentally, there isn’t a song called “I have answers.”

Which leads me to my general PSA that I make it a point not to write in the tone of grinding axes. So if you are a new reader (welcome!), go back and read that former paragraph with a smile. We’re all doing our best. They did theirs. And with time and love… we’ve all succeeded in doing better! Answers have come with love and forgiveness not far behind.

Fast forward to my middle-age years! Specifically to Cyber Monday 2023 - the first Monday after Thanksgiving. I have always wanted to take a spit test; a DNA test. I’ve been, I think understandably, curious about my ethnic background. Not because when I look in the mirror I see something that makes me think “one of these things is not like the other” as I formulate the family photo in my mind. I physically look like the rest of the family. And not because I wasn’t told (if but FINALLY) who my biological father was (by-the bye… he died in 2009… I found out by googling him. Put a pin in that… I’ll circle back.)

Also, I would occasionally fantasize about being able to fully fill out a medical history form with a full knowledge of said medical history - not simply my maternal side - and my pea brain told me that maybe finding a new paternal aunt or uncle (who in that same dream world have been waiting for me to pop up on Ancestry or 23 and Me or whatever) would shed light for me - even though my bio-dad is watching on the other side of heaven. The stories we tell ourselves. This is the story I’ve mused on for several years. You do your best with what you’re given.

So Cyber Monday of 2023 rolls around and up pops the spit test for 50% off the normal price! I purchase it. Finally! Of course it was important. But not important enough to pay full price. I’m a pretty healthy gal and there’s nothing really of urgency to find out. Expectations low. Never-the-less, it arrives - a small box with a plastic tube inside.

I let it sit on my desk for a month. Sometime before Christmas, I spit. I mail. I wait. And actually, I forget.

Happy New Year, 2024!

I wonder if you have the same feelings about the last 4 or 5 years. There’s been upheaval, change, deaths, growth, pruning, shifting, and much healing (hopefully), - for me not just due to the obvious world changes - definitely exacerbated by them. From 2018 to the present it has been a runaway train. My list would look like this:

1. 2018 - Grandmother (mom) is diagnosed with ALZ, Moved into Memory Care, Quick demise, many flights, FaceTimes and breakdowns in the middle of night on the bathroom floor with what I call the “cry towel” so as not to wake the sleeping. (Note: always waking the sleeping - my husband who roundly picks me up off the floor and holds me until the moment is over.)

2. 2019 - I quit a long time job - story for another time… and 3 weeks later Mom (Grandmother) dies of ALZ… on my husband’s birthday.

3. Also 2019 - we move out of NYC and I begin a new position doing A NEW THING.

4. 2020.

5. 2021 - That was not the job. I create an LLC and teach online because we are all still working on. the. line.

6. 2022-2023 - limbo. - (Where God does much soul surgery.)

7. 2023 - we move again to Texas (wrong place, rough year, PURGATORY, more surgery. )

8. 2024 (summer) we move again to another city in Texas that’s much better. But I’m burying the lead…

Late 2023: I take a DNA test.

TWENTY TWENTY FOUR: The results are in.

I encourage you to make your own “The Last Five Years List”. It will give you a full picture of just how much you have gone through - and how much you have prevailed.

The DNA results came through the second week of January, 2024. A mere 8 months ago.

There was a match.

And with that match proof that, with God, nothing, even the unthinkable, will be impossible.

To be continued….

For with God nothing will be impossible. Luke 1:37