The Greatest Gift, an unknown adult daughter found!!

I am writing this to try and organize my many emotions and thoughts. I also want to keep as much of an accurate detail of events as I can. This has been a life altering discovery. As each hour has passed, the emotions have begun to wane and my thoughts have started to become rational once again. However, it really depends on which hour we are talking about. March 9th, 2019, was like any other Saturday for our family during club volleyball season. I decided to hit the gym before everyone woke up and started preparing for an all-day volleyball tournament. I returned home to find my oldest daughter stumbling down the hall on her way to find socks, my wife was just about ready, so I took a quick shower and we loaded up the car. My youngest decided to stay home with grandma on this particular Saturday. I have two girls, one 15 year old and one 11 year old. The drive to the tournament consisted of normal conversation, discussions about volleyball, how tired we all were, but happy that the tournament was only a 30 minute drive. We unloaded the car, paid for our entry and found the rest of the team. Laid out food on our claimed table, found out which court we were playing on, then proceeded to find our seats. The gym was a little cold but not uncomfortable. With my wife next to me and my oldest sitting down in front of us as she waited for warm ups to start. With everyone getting settled in, I decided to check my email and found that I had received my AncestryDNA results back. For Christmas, my wife bought us all a DNA kit for fun. The girls had received their results back already and nothing too exciting came from them. I opened my email and followed the link to the AncestryDNA app. As I opened it, I moved through the plethora of information, lineage showing mostly Great Britain, Ireland, and Native American. As I scrolled through to the “Matches” tab, I was wondering if there would be aunts or uncles on there, maybe even a cousin or two. As the tab opened up for close matches, I saw that my two daughters were on there. On this particular app, they are shown as “Parent/Child”. As an inside joke within the family, when the girls would call me “dad” I would say, “You don’t know that for a fact”! All as an ongoing joke, there was no malicious intent. So, when the two popped up as my children, we had a bit of a laugh, or at least I did in my head. To my instant bewilderment however, there was another close match that showed up as “parent/child”. As I sat there staring at my phone, I was confused. I think I simply stared at my phone for several minutes running through my mind of the possibilities. I am not a promiscuous man, even in my younger days, like most young men, we talked a big game, but there were seldom moments to back the talk up, so I wasn’t racking my mind trying to tally up opportunities of possible children out there, I was actually lost in thought about possibly being adopted myself. I grew up in an unsavory, rough environment. A book could probably be written about my childhood. It certainly wasn’t the worst possible childhood, but it definitely wasn’t good. I remember thinking numerous times how great it would be if I woke up one day and found out that I had been adopted. How my lack of feelings for my parents would have been explained and that I could simply walk away from the hellish world that I was in. That of course never happened, but now, as I sat there looking at an unknown name possibly being either my mother or another child, I think I was lost in a childhood fantasy, that the truth was finally about to come out. Of course, there was another possibility. I served in the United States navy in the early to mid ‘90’s and as I was leaving to come back home for good, my girlfriend, well, working on ex-girlfriend, told me that she was pregnant. My first reaction was that she was lying; simply trying to get me to stay. I won’t lie, I was in no shape to change my mind on where I was heading. I was done with the Navy, I was done with Florida, I had to go home. I had to surround myself with people that I had grown up with, I needed to be able to talk to people that truly knew me. So, I got on the train. It was a three day trip to make it back home to Oregon, which I didn’t mind. It gave me time to process this new found information, it gave me an opportunity to simply be lost within my own mind. After I returned home, I started logging in the middle of winter. Long days, cold days, but days that I could focus my pent up energy on something productive. As the weeks went by, I couldn’t help but to go back and think of those last words I had heard in Florida. As the weeks wore on, it ate at me that I didn’t have an answer, that I wasn’t able to man up and stick around a bit longer to discuss the possibility of a child further. Our relationship was over, but I didn’t want to be a deadbeat dad. I worked up the nerve to call and check up on my ex-girlfriend. The conversation was anything but cordial, which I had anticipated. I couldn’t blame her. It was the classic, leave her standing alone at the station, apparently, pregnant. Several phone conversations over the next year ensued with each ending with her telling me that the pregnancy was either terminated or that I had nothing to worry about. So, I had no choice but to move on. Fast forward 24 years, sitting on a cold bleacher, breaking out in a cold sweat, I handed my phone to my wife and said “what do you think this means”? Immediately she knew. “You have another daughter” she emphasized in a whispered yell. Before I got married, I told my future wife that there was a slim possibility that I had another child out there. We handle emotions and baggage differently from each other. Where that was the last time I ever really thought about it, she kept in in her mind, just in case. My oldest sitting on the bleacher seat just below us had a look of serious confusion. A quick lesson in history to her kind of cleared it up, but there were still some questions lingering. We’d have to get to those at a later time. Within 15 minutes of me opening the app, we were frantically looking to see how we could contact this mysterious “Parent/Child”. Although there was a little hope still left in me that I was the adopted, I knew that if I had another child out there, I wanted to know. Being a parent has been the single greatest reward I’ve had in life. I had to know whom this person was and exactly how they were related to me, so I sent a message through Ancestry, stating that I had just received my results and would like to discuss our DNA connection if they were willing. As every minute passed, it seemed to take years off my life. Stuck in my own head for much of the time, I began to realize that the strongest possibility was that I had another daughter out there. I had seen my own birth certificate, my boot camp picture and my grandfather’s boot camp picture would be hard to tell a difference between the two if it wasn’t for the aging of his picture. I have a very similar structure to my dad, the red hair, the blue eyes, the grumpiness, all told me that I wasn’t adopted. The viable possibility was that I had a daughter out there that I didn’t think existed. Luckily, the longest hour of my life had finally passed. I opened my email for the 700th time and saw a new message. As my heart raced, I couldn’t read fast enough. She had mentioned that she was adopted and it had been a closed adoption so she didn’t know anything further. However, she did mention that she was willing to further discuss and try to solve the mystery. Really, what mystery was there to solve? I had DNA testing, she had DNA testing, and she was as closely related to me as my known daughters were to me. Her DNA matching in between my other two daughters. I just had to know for sure, I was honestly protecting my own heart and mind. The more I sat and thought about it, the weight of the situation and life choices began crushing my soul. I left Jacksonville Florida in November of 1995. I had one question left for me to honestly seal the deal in my mind. I didn’t want to come across as some “weirdo” just trying to get information so my next message back to her was filled with some family information. I told her that I will have been married for 20 years this year and that I had a 15 year old and 11 year old daughter. I asked when and where she was born. I knew that if she was my daughter, her only answer should have been between May and July of 1996. We were sending messages back and forth much quicker now, but from the time I hit send to the next message was an eternity. I was at my daughter’s volleyball tournament, watching her through blurry eyes, stressing that she would do well, and trying to solve the biggest mystery of my life. Luckily, we were in between games and sitting in the car eating when her reply came back. June, 1996, in Jacksonville Florida. The weight of the world slammed down on me from every direction. Everything went dark and I literally began to sob. I couldn’t handle the truth staring me in the face. My heart shattered into a million pieces. I went from extreme anger to the deepest depths of sadness to an overwhelming sensation of outright joy. I couldn’t differentiate between any of the emotions however. I kind of remember murmuring some words but couldn’t tell you honestly what they were. Since I don’t leak from my eyes, it was odd for me to try and reign it in. I looked back at my daughter sitting in the back seat and saw tears in her eyes. As the initial waves of a million thoughts and emotions began to subside a bit, I sent a message back telling her that there was only one answer, that this whole situation could only be what it seems. She is my daughter. I couldn’t wrap my head around what I was typing. I certainly felt that over 22 years ago, I buried any thought that she even existed. I didn’t have any way to prove otherwise. I was 3000 miles away from the one person that knew the truth. The internet and social media wasn’t what it is today. Whatever emotions and my own issues were that I’d have to work through didn’t matter. My wife and I immediately welcomed her into our hearts. It is one of the strangest and most fulfilling emotions that I’ve ever had. There was no doubt, there wasn’t even a split second that I questioned it. To feel an immediate connection to someone 3000 miles away, someone that I knew nothing about cannot be put into words. As each exchanged message was passed, a clearer picture came into view. We knew nothing about her and she knew nothing about us. Suddenly, she was aware that she had two sisters in the world, two blood sisters. Numerous aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins and grandparents. She now had access to her own history and the history of her birth family. For the last several weeks, we have exchanged messages, Facetimed, and have set up a trip to go and meet her in person. I feel like the luckiest man alive. A story of this magnitude, I couldn’t even imagine. Life is such a beautiful ride!