February 2023, Part 1

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 and I wondered if Ancestry might be able to see how many times I was logging in to check the shipping status of my test. The cousin shared her facebook page with me but I didn’t friend her immediately just in case we weren’t related. 

I was checking my maybe-father’s facebook page pretty much every morning to see what he’d written or shared overnight, when he was most active. I got the impression that he was in a reflective space because he was writing and sharing some about his past. I was reading, filing away any interesting tidbits, and going about my day. I wrote that I’d take things in and let them go because I didn’t even know if he was actually my father. 

In looking at his photos I wondered if I had his nose, or where my green eyes came from. He was writing in the wee hours about his back pain and use of painkillers. The previous day he posted a photo of himself holding a chihuahua mix with the caption reading “my son”. I’d dug around enough to learn that his actual son wasn’t on facebook, but I knew that he had at least one actual human son. 

I would see the photos he posted and wonder about him. There was a Christmas tree made of deer antlers. Or a post about needing a “good dose of second amendment freedom of speech”, whatever that meant. I didn’t quite get where he was going with that - probably the painkillers were dulling his clarity, but it gave me a sense of unease, if he was my father. Shortly after he posted about gun rights, he was posting about humane migration policies. I was having a hell of a time trying to decipher his beliefs and where he stood on things. Then he posted about getting chickens due to the cost of eggs and the fires. 

In my notes, I wrote that I was very careful not to click “like” on his facebook posts, especially when I was reading the few replies or the longer posts where I had to click “read more”. 

I was sleeping like “absolute garbage”. My sleep habits were conk out as soon as my head hit the pillow and then wake up entirely too early. I wrote that “the cat is the main beneficiary of my insomnia” because she never minded an early breakfast. 

I signed up for an account on Classmates.com. Or signed up for again, because I had used that site to reconnect with some of my high school friends back before facebook was a thing. I had the idea that I might be able to look at old yearbooks on there, possibly yearbooks from the time that my mother was in high school. I wanted to see if she was pregnant in any of the photos when she was around 16 years old. And I wanted to see if I might be able to identify people that might have known her or my birth certificate father. My mother has an account on Classmates.com and she may have been notified when I looked at her profile. I checked the option to not notify her, but who knows. It turns out you have to buy a membership in order to look at old yearbooks and I didn’t do that, but I saw my mother had a 1976 yearbook in her profile. Someone visited my profile but I didn’t pay for a membership and it was blurred out so I couldn’t tell for sure who it was. 

One of the private investigators emailed me to let me know she was taking on my case. She asked for a copy of the background check, which I shared with her. 

I poked around a little bit on wikitree and found my mother, but since she was living, I wasn’t able to see any details. 

February 2, 2023 - I was having what I called “mini waves of anxiety” every time I thought about the possible outcomes from the private investigator as well as the DNA test. I finally got some decent sleep, but I wrote that before midnight it occurred to me why I was feeling anxious - “I guess I thought I was okay, but this is opening old wounds and threatening my peace”. I hadn’t any contact with my relatives on my mother’s since since 2007 and my maybe-father’s side since 2000 and here I was, digging to see what I could learn and about to make matches, potentially, with a DNA test. 

I got another profile view on Classmates, but even though it was blurred, I didn’t think it was my mother. 

February 3, 2023 - As if he were reading my mind, my maybe-father wrote a post on facebook about how he’d done a DNA test, but however he did his, he “wouldn’t get a notice about long-lost cousin Gertrude” and that he liked it that way. He said that was a selling point for him. (So this should have been a red flag for me because he was saying out loud that he wasn’t interested in connecting with any of his long-lost family.) He also wrote about his father being a long-haul truck driver. I didn’t know how that related to him doing a DNA test, or where and why he took a test that wouldn’t lead to him connecting with family, but I wondered if his father also being in trucking was how he came to meet my mother, since my family was also in trucking. 

He wrote about knowing people at Duke Power and I wondered if he had worked there at some point. 

February 4, 2023 - Lots of clues in my maybe-father’s post today! His page was and is public, so I will share it with some redactions for privacy, even though I don’t think they deserve it. 

“I was talking to my daughter a couple of days ago and some generic hospital experiences came up in the conversation.  She asked me if those experiences messed up my psyche and I told her I didn't know.

Well I've thought about it and I've reached a conclusion. So I've decided that yes it did. Although I don't know whether the effects came from the brain injury or the experiences, I can say they both made me the man that I am today.

But there are all the things before that too. Mom sitting me across the ditch and abandoning me to go to Texas with my sister when I was 3. His first child’s mom leaving me, to disappear with my son and have him adopted so I couldn't find him for over b 20 years. My mother and her parents threatening me with arrest if I ever tried to see my daughter only to tell her that I was her father 20 years later because the man she thought was her father died. That was a mess and impacted us both.  Some other thing I said and did that will go to the grave with me probably.

But yes place he worked left the most recent scars. The lessons I learned there were as follows. Nobody gets out of life alive. The pain of dying follow a spectrum. Some people die quick. Some people's last days are actually weeks or months. A lot of convicts are psychopaths or sociopaths. Same can be said for those wearing uniforms. Yes there are those who think their purpose was to personally punish convicts by exaggerating the rules. Not all brain dead people are brain dead. Some wake up. It's not hard for family to remove someone from life support meaning the person dies from malnutrition and dehydration. I guess that means that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Some people take pleasure in watching people die. Some people would torture the dying people if not constrained.

Did all of this impact my mental health. Ya damned Skippy it did. But so does getting your brain broke. Where the TBI drops out and the PTSD starts, I don't know.

I do know that I dream about places he worked  every damned night. I know that my experiences at the Sheriff's Department and other place he worked  make me believe that the first words most people tell me are a lie whether is that they didn't know anything about it or they will call me back tomorrow.

I am what I am. That sounds a little like God's name doesn't it?  It wasn't meant that way. As a convict who killed a man 50 years ago when he was active army at Fort Bragg used to tell me about a decade ago from his wheelchair, "You just be you goddammit!"

My answer now is, "can you ever really be anyone else?"  The psychopaths and sociopaths are just being them although the majority of people don't know ehow or what the real "them" is.

Peace. Love. Happiness. Most of all, you just be you. If I ever think you aren't then I will remove you from my friends list. I've done that to so many people.

I'm at the point now where I have neither the desire nor a reason to be anyone else.”

And he ended the post by tagging his wife, my half sister, his wife’s kids, and his oldest son. That tag was how I found out the identity of my oldest half-brother. I knew I probably had an older half-brother, but this is how I learned who he was. 

There’s a lot to unpack in this post. 

1. He said he was abandoned by his mother and shared how that impacted him throughout his life. I wonder if it affected him so, why did he abandon at least two of his children? It seems to me, if you have empathy, you would do everything in your power not to repeat the cycle. 

2. His first wife left him and hid his son from him for over 20 years, allegedly. 

3. That my mother and her family threatened to have him arrested if he tried to see me. Again, allegedly. 

4. Yes, it was a mess and definitely impacted us both. I will agree with him there. I know on my end, I felt rejected by him in 1999 and 2000 but we’ll get back to how that all went down. 

5. What is the some other thing he said and did that he will take to his grave? By the timing of it right after he speaks of me, I have to believe it was something he did related to me. 

6. He speaks about dying, sociopaths and psychopaths, and wearing a uniform. I would later find out what uniforms those were and more about the things he did while wearing them.