So, I have several posts-worth of updates that I meant to write before this one, but this JUST happened and feels too significant not to write about in the moment.
I just spoke with my possible paternal aunt!!!
I think I mentioned earlier that, a while back, I had sent out facebook friend requests to several Reilly family members who I had (okay, creeplily) found over the interwebs. Anyway, as of a couple months or so ago, only one of them, Meredith (name changed), had accepted my friend request, and it just so happened to be the “family historian”.
Gulp! This could either be good or bad?
From what I could tell over Facebook, she and I seemed to have a lot in common (similar beliefs, both love animals, etc. etc.), so I figured she would probably accept me, but I didn’t know for sure.
Fast forward a bit, and I had a realization about my brother’s Y-DNA results. I already knew that Reilly (and variations of the name) showed up in his Y-DNA match list. What I didn’t (for some reason) put together was that this actually quickly narrows down my list of who my paternal grandparents could be. After reading up about how Y-DNA works, I learned that Y-DNA is ONLY passed from fathers to sons. It traces one’s father’s father’s father’s (etc.) heritage line. That means that the Reilly surname was passed on to my brother(s) from our father, and from HIS father, and his father’s father. This gives me one big gigantic clue–our donor’s biological FATHER (not mother) was a Reilly. Our paternal grandparent’s father was a Reilly. Robert Edwin Reilly only had two sons. Jacob Robert Reilly and Ryan David Reilly.
As it turns out, Meredith is Ryan David Reilly daughter.
I’ve been treading lightly, not wanting to message her about all of this and possibly scare her (and maybe my biological father, who may be one of her brothers) away.
Anyway, fast forward again. This time, Nicole posts something on facebook about how she was just tested for skin cancer (fortunately her results were clear), and how she recently found out that skin cancer runs in part of the Reilly family. Also that she has a vitamin D deficiency. Incidentally, I had just had my own blood-work done and am also vitamin D deficient, so I posted something about this on her timeline (and thanking her for sharing the hereditary information re: skin cancer/melanoma in the family).
Jessie, who I hadn’t heard from in a while, responded to my post! She shared a little more information about how melanoma runs in the Reilly family, and suggested that I get in touch with Meredith (!) to try and find out more about genetic health of the rest of the Reilly family (since she had limited information but figured Meredith would know more).
Well, no time like the present, eh?
It took some healthy encouragement from Nicole and a big dose of bravery on my part, but I decided that I couldn’t keep putting off talking to Meredith for forever.
I put aside the risk that she, my own family, and probably my largest lifeline to learning more about this side of myself, might reject me. I put aside the risk that she might also warn her male family members that I was looking for them, in order to “protect” them. But, ultimately, I had to have a little faith, and hope that she would find it in her heart to feel compassion toward me. And that she might even be interested, too. That maybe she WOULD see me as a person who mattered, as, in some way, family. As worthy of love and connection. So, I pushed aside my fears and took the plunge.
(In order to be respectful to Meredith, since I’m not sure how she would feel about my blogging about this, I’m not going to paste our whole conversation verbatim. I’ll start off with my initial messages, then switch to a summary of hers.)
I held my breath, then eventually let it go and moved on with my day when I realized I wasn’t going to receive a response immediately. I told myself that she was probably just busy and not on facebook at the time.
Later that night, while I was out to dinner with my family, I saw that she had responded! At first I was too scared to read what she said, but then decided that I didn’t want her to think that I was rude for not responding right away. Without fully reading her message, I skimmed it and noted that she had sent some top-line hereditary health information, then expressed a curiosity around how exactly we are related. Oh boy.
I quickly wrote back thanking her for her quick response, then said that I was out at dinner with my family and couldn’t write back much at the moment. And that the “how we’re related” thing is a bit complicated, but that I’d be able to explain it better once I got home.
I couldn’t eat much for the rest of the meal–WAY too nervous to keep anything else down!
When I got home, I messaged Meredith back.
I had dropped the bombshell. From there, all I could do was wait and pray.
Fortunately, someone up there was listening, because my prayer was answered.
In a grand act of cosmic mercy, Meredith was not only compassionate toward me, but INTERESTED and EXCITED about the fact that we are family! She immediately started asking me questions about where my brothers and I were born and whatever details I had about our parents’ donor/our biological father. I don’t want to quote her full response, but I think it’s safe to share one thing verbatim, which was “This is just so cool”.
Phew!!! I expressed my relief that she was okay with all of this and wasn’t immediately seeking to disown me from her life.
Quite the opposite–she was incredibly supportive and promised to try and help me figure it out. Even after I explained James’ Y-DNA results, and how that narrowed down the list of possible grandparents to the males of that generation, she was still with me. Without my having to explain further, she deduced that Jacob Robert Reilly and her father were my only grandparent options, and that, as a result, she may very well be my Aunt. And she found this exciting!!!
I also explained how I had been doing a lot of research, and had been finding that fertility doctors weren’t always 100% ethical in how they came about their “donors”.
She mentioned that one of her brothers had been in a Philadelphia hospital for a severe accident in the 80s, and surmised that it was possible that the doctors had taken various sample from him to check his vitals and fertility as they treated him. While we can’t know if this is true yet, just the fact that she was open to exploring these possibilities with me was so reassuring. She also suggested that, if not one of her brothers, it could have been one of her cousins, Keith (name changed), who is Jacob Robert Reilly’s only son, (and who currently lives in South Jersey, close to Philadelphia), although she specified that he is Jacob’s only son as far as she knows. Anything is possible! The fact that she was even willing to entertain that idea (and not regard it as blasphemy) was also reassuring to me. We didn’t explore that option too much for the moment, though.
Instead, I sent her a bunch of family photos of my brothers and I as we were growing up. Possibly too many, haha.
I told her that I would stop sending pictures for now, since I wasn’t sure if I was overwhelming her. She said she was excited to see more! So send more I did! I won’t include them all here, but there were pictures of us in our Halloween costumes growing up, family reunion photos with my Dad’s family, a family vacation to the Grand Canyon, prom pictures, college pictures, and more. I tried to give her a sprinkling that would catch her up a bit on our life, on who we are, and that we are okay. We’ve had a great life with our Dad, even though it was apart from our biological family. I wanted to humanize us a little bit, too.
She said that seeing the pictures made her so happy. And that she thinks I’m her niece, because we look very much alike!!
🙂
We chatted for about half an hour longer, and she assured me that she would talk to her brothers (and pass along family pictures of their own!)
I thanked her over and over again for being so open and welcoming, then we said goodnight.
I’m still sort of pinching myself about it, and also trying not to get my hopes up too high…there’s still the possibility that she’ll feel differently after sleeping on it, or that after talking to her brothers, they might ask her to discontinue our conversations.
But I have to hope. I have to hope that blood is thicker than fear, and the ties of family are bound by the type of love that knows no other bounds.
Here I am. The prodigal seed that has since flowered across the meadow. No longer fully yours, but not entirely theirs, either. Whatever I am, I have returned.