PART 2: Jump Toward Hope

*This is PART 2 in a four-part series. To read PART 1 click below.*

PART 1: The Gift of Adoption

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JUMP TOWARDS HOPE

This is where the story turns from feelings of hope, to feelings of fear and nervousness.

At this point, the AncestryDNA 'match' could be nothing. But it could also be something. There was this feeling in the back of my head. What if they don't want to know me? What if their family doesn't know about me? What if they're upset I haven't reached out yet? What if they're psychotic?

And this is where the story turns from racing ahead to slowing down. I'm really thankful for the people in my life who slow me down. I have several people I can talk to that I know will slow my roll. During this part of the story - the part of nervousness and fear and anticipation - I talked to these people a lot.

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So I clicked on it. And it turns out, a 'close relative match' is NOT something AncestryDNA says to everyone as a marketing ploy. I really did have a close match, and the person who I was matched with used their real name for their AncestryDNA username.

"Let's search Facebook!" he said. And like a scared little girl, I dug my heels in.

Here I am, on the brink of something scary. I don't know how this is going to turn out. Whether this is something or nothing - it really doesn't matter. Who do I want to be? How do I want to live this out? How do I want Macy to handle scary situations, someday?

I know this really inspiring woman who consistently runs and jumps freely into the hard thing. She dives right in, confident in who she is and what she has to offer. She chooses discomfort often, and I've seen her grow before my very eyes.

That's what I want to do. I want to run and jump and flail, worried about nothing more than how the wind feels in my hair as I fly.

So this is what I did.

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"Okay, yes. Let's search Facebook."

Facebook is good for a couple things - one of those things is looking at pictures and making all kinds of assumed connections. In our case, it worked out okay, thankfully. But I wouldn't recommend it.

The person I was matched with on AncestryDNA shared a Facebook account with her husband, but had photos of her three grown kids. Two sons and a daughter. A few clicks, and we were scrolling through her son's Facebook photos.

One photo stood out to us.

The caption read: Scott and me in front of Dad's 1968 Mooney M20C "Ranger" airplane, circa 1975.

I know very little about my birth family at this point. But one piece of information that I DID have was that one of my grandfathers was a pilot.

At this point (after 5 minutes on Facebook) we believed that the person I was matched with on AncestryDNA was one of my grandmothers.

One of her three children was one of my birth parents.

I remember staring at the photo of these three grown kids of hers. Which one is it? Do I look like any of them? They look happy. Am I about to turn everything upside down?

A few hours ago, I believed that this AncestryDNA kit would just be a concise little sentence in my book. But, it's looking like it's actually its own chapter.

And it might even effect the rest of the book.

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Because we don't trust Facebook with the trajectory of our lives, we decided to do some extra detective work. Jake has connections with a local police department, and they did a quick workup on the person I was matched with on AncestryDNA. Her phone numbers were from the area I was born, and although she now lives in a different part of the country, it was pretty clear based on the other information provided that she WAS who AncestryDNA said she was.

Literally, about 8 hours had passed from the time I got the AncestryDNA email to the time we had confirmation of who my match was. Yesterday I was just walking along, minding my own business. Today, I'm on the edge of a cliff faced with a choice. Now that I have this information, I can sit on it and do nothing. That's an option. It might have been the comfortable option, because, WHAT IF?!?!

And then I think about that woman I know who runs and jumps. 'Sitting on it' is not running and jumping and flailing and laughing.

So I jumped.

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{Click here for PART 3}