Today I want to share some of the conversations with my father. Most of this happened via facebook messenger and I have saved these texts in case anything happened. Until today I have not re-read them but here we go! My reactions are in bold. 2/25/23 in a Facebook message he said none of his grandkids are clamoring to meet him. He said a couple are “tolerant with no real interest” and the others are “ambivalent distant”. This was our first day of talking and I didn’t see red

Remember this post from last September? Yeah, that box of squares is still sitting in my craft room. It's actually worse than this. I crocheted even more squares and the box is overflowing! I have a ton of yarn just sitting and now that I can knit and crochet again, I think I'll put these squares together to make a few blankets. I found out that our local library is a Project Linus drop off location! I can also knit or crochet more blankets with the unused bins of yarn I have

Where was I? It’s been a while since I wrote on this - busy with work, kids, kittens, life. Y’all know how it goes. On February 26, 2023 I can see where I chatted with my half-sister by text. Around 1:30 in the afternoon I messaged her to say I hoped she was having a good day. We talked about the weather where we each live and she sent me some photos from where she was living. She said she’d lived near or on the beach, but moved in January for a change of scenery. The previ

That bottom right corner was so tedious! Stanley wanted to help. He stole my chair any chance he got and he walked through wet paint several times. So helpful! Not a single thought behind those little eyes! Boo! Is that where he's supposed to be? Probably not. This is Phoebe and she's never done anything wrong in her whole life. And I finished it! I started this one months ago and was getting worried that the paint would dry out before I completed the piece. The inspiration:

Buckle in, this is going to be another long one! February 25, 2023. The first actual conversation with my father. I went to bed after midnight and was awake by 4:30 am. I got bored trying to go back to sleep so I checked my phone. There were a bunch of messages on facebook messenger from my father - he sent me a good number of messages telling me all about his side of the family and all of their health ailments. He said he at least wanted to tell me that “in case things go

Taking a break in the story, but no worries! I've been writing and the next post is about ready to go live. What have I been up to recently? Well, I started a really cool job that I am loving this month! It's remote and the people really are as great as they seem. Last year I volunteered with them and it seemed too good to be true. Still does, actually. I've even mentioned it when people have checked in on how things are going and I guess I still can't believe it's real. So y

February 24, 2023 - Things are about to get long! I’m looking back now at our early conversations on messenger and on 2/22/23 I’d told my half-sister that I’d done a DNA test and was waiting for the results. I asked if she remembered meeting me at Chili’s back in 1999 (oh, I can’t wait to get to this story later!) and she said she did, and this is where she told me she’d actually looked for me the week before. I don’t know if she’d found me, but she wanted to know why I was r

February 23, 2023 - As I’m looking back on all of this, I can see this was a time where I was so full of hope. (Stupid.) I thought I was going to connect with my half-sister and maybe my father and half-brother. I worried that my father might not be ready or want to hear from me, but I was going to put myself out there to see what happened. As much as it bites me in the ass, and it will, I am always the one reaching out to connect. I carry relationships even beyond their life

It’s so interesting looking back at my notes from all of this because I feel like an entirely different person. Or this seems more like a weird dream than a time period in my life. I have barely scratched the surface and even though I saved all of my facebook messages (the main way I was able to speak to my father), or texts with my half-sister, I haven’t read them since they happened. Until now. February 11, 2023 - After my first chats with my step-father I began creating hi

Picking up where I left off so lets just dive in… February 5, 2023 - I was still looking at what he was posting on facebook at the time and trying to determine what type of law enforcement he was talking about. Was he a police officer? A warden in a jail? He talked about being in basic training, which got me wondering if he was in the military at some point. He mentioned “snitching” (his words) on two officers having a relationship and how he suspected that “being a known sni

A photo I took from around this time in 2023 I have a lot of notes and screenshots from February because this is when things really start to pick up. February 1, 2023 - I responded to a distant cousin (the one whose grandfather is my grandfather’s brother) and we were chatting on Ancestry while I checked the status of my DNA kit for the 100th time. We talked about how we might match since she had already taken a DNA test. I learned that I should get my test by February 6th a

At the end of January 2023 I was finding out too much and not enough so I contacted a couple of private investigators. While I waited, I messaged a couple of the people on Ancestry that listed my maternal grandfather in their trees. My main concern with hiring a private investigator was the can of worms I might be opening up. I worried that they might uncover the tax fraud my mother committed all the years she claimed me as a dependent on her taxes while I was living with my

What a whirlwind this past week has been! Last week I saw several litters of kittens on facebook shared from the Humane Society in the next county over. One was a litter of manx kittens that were adorable, and then there was this litter of four girls and a runty tuxedo boy. The girls were two orange and white that reminded me so much of our kitty that we lost in December, and the other two were grey/maybe dilute torties. I sent the Humane Society a message because the kittens

I'm honestly not sure where a whole month went, but here we are! After the cat cafe visit, we went to the beach. Let me share some photos... There was a pink full moon and the beach was so bright at night! We watched the sun set every night from different places on the island. Another sunset. The four of us! This was my favorite sunset - we walked to the end of the island for an unobstructed view. We came back and you know all the stuff that you put off, plus everything that'

Yesterday we spent the morning with some friends at the park, then we headed to a cat cafe. They had 12 kitties and I got my fix of petting cats. I would love to have put a couple of them in my pockets and brought them home. The sun was a coveted spot in the cafe. The black and white one is called SassyTina. I didn't get "sass" from her. Gabi - tiny but sweet. I probably pet her the most. This one was enjoying her time in the sun This cat was conked out until it was time for

Over the years I have tried, off and on, to piece together what happened and where everything went so wrong. For a number of years I was too busy with babies, then toddlers, then homeschooling to really research, dig into my family tree, or write down my story. But I picked it up again in November of 2022 when I joined Ancestry.com. I didn’t make the jump to taking a DNA test but I spent days researching and building my family tree. And it was fascinating! On the first day I

It’s March 9, 2026 when I’m starting this. I had a podcast back in 2024 - crazy to think that was 2 years ago! I liked researching and writing, but not so much the act of recording and definitely not editing. I actually can’t stand the sound of my voice, especially when it’s recorded, and editing means hours of listening to my voice and editing out all the “ums”, long silences, and other bits that no one wants to hear while they listen to a podcast. But I did have a podcast w

Are you ever in a meeting or chatting with someone and they unintentionally say something that just ruins your day but also you needed to hear it? That happened again today but let me start with the last time this happened. I was doing an interview for a podcast, which to my knowledge never aired, but the topic was DNA testing and my experience with that. I was answering all of her questions and talking about all the people I'd met or reconnected with on Ancestry when she ask

January is always a weird time for me. It's cold, the days are short, and it's that slumpy time after a marathon of holidays. Slumpy apparently isn't a word, but I bet all of you know the feeling. We also had back-to-back winter storms. One weekend we had an inch of ice (sleet, freezing rain) and then it stayed below freezing all week, which meant nothing melted. Then the next weekend we had over a foot of snow. I'm in the south and we don't do that kind of weather. It's fun

First off, the painting I'm working on! It's in that stage where you wonder what the hell you're doing because what even is this? You gotta trust the process and push through the weird stage. I worked on it a bit last night between a volunteer project and dinner. It looks like I'll have some leftover paint and rather than waste it, I'm wondering what I can create with the remnants. I'm terribly distracted with everything, to be honest. The loss of our cat, what's going on wit