best for REAL LIFE
Fiona Myles received an unusual present from her husband… and it changed her life
Tearing the festive paper off the small gift box, I suspected my husband Brian had bought me jewellery.
It was Christmas Day 2021 and we were in lockdown, so it was just us and our daughter, Georgie, then six. As the final shreds of paper came away, it became clear I’d guessed wrong.
‘What is it?’ I asked. Closer inspection revealed it was aDNA testing kit, and my eyes started welling up.
‘I want to help you find out who you really are,’ said Brian. An unusual gift, maybe, but one which showed Brian understood me…
I was six years old when Mum revealed to me that I was adopted. While I was raised in an amazing, loving family, I always felt there was something missing. I wanted to know more about who I was.
In the Eighties, when I was in my 20s, I’d managed to track down my birth mum. She told me my biological dad had died years ago. Using the name she’d given me, I tried to look him up on registers and even searched for his gravestone, but I couldn’t find anything.
Then, at the age of 50, I became mum to Georgie, a distant relative on my birth mum’s side of the family, who Brian and I officially took into our care under a special guardianship order.
Since becoming a mum, I’d joined various adoption support groups to help me deal with the adoption trauma that I’d experienced throughout my life, which resulted in anger and rejection issues.
I found out I had an adoption file containing information about my biological family, which I got hold of in October 2021, hoping to find answers. I was floored to discover my biological father wasn’t who I’d been led to believe. My birth mum, who had sadly died in 2005, had given me the wrong name and information.
There was a real possibility my dad could still be alive.
Now Brian had given me a gift that had the power to change everything – maybe it could help me find my biological dad – and hopefully I’d gain some closure.
The DNA test kit sat on the side for weeks – I was worried about what it may or may not reveal. ‘For goodness sake, just do it,’ Brian gently said one day.
He was right…I had to do this. Taking a deep breath, I opened the kit, dribbled in a little tube as instructed, and sent the test off in the post. There was a six-to-eight-week wait for the results, but that didn’t stop me logging on to my account on the website and checking every day. Sometime in March 2022, the results pinged up on the system and I was immediately matched with a potential cousin – the s
