My name is Debbie Kay Schaaf and I submitted a request for Adoptee Merch's DNA Kit Commit Program. I am a 62 year old adoptee. I have always known that I was adopted since the day it happened in December of 1963 when I was 7 years old. I truly did not really understand what was happening at the time. Just to say I believe what I was told which turned out to be mostly lies.
The reason that I have not purchased a DNA testing kit is because I don’t have the money to get one myself.
I want answers about my biological father. The one person I have not been able to find out for sure if he truly is alive or if we share DNA.
Not knowing who you are and where you come from can have an impact on your life and the lives of around. You look at people and wonder if they might be related to you. Also you look for people who look like you. It hurts in a way that as an adoptee you cannot explain to someone who has not experienced it.
To find out that a great deal of what you have been told about your past is lies, this can give you trust issues in a major way. The trauma of not know and being lied to is enough to make some people feel like they are not worth anything to anybody. It makes you wonder if you can trust what people when they tell you something.
Also the feeling that you do not fit in anywhere, even with family (adoptive and biological) sometimes you can feel invisible in a room full of people. Even leave the room or group you are with and come back and no one there even notice that you were gone. I should know I have done it just to prove my point.
You can have issues letting people get close to you because you start wondering if they will abandon or reject you for no apparent reason.
Wondering if your father ever thought of you on your birthday or at Christmas, wondering if he just thought of you wondered how you were doing. Did he ever just want to see me and give me a hug and maybe tell me he loved me?
I've always wondered if my possible biological father and my adoptive father were related. Trying to figure out if the similarities in these two men a life has been antagonizing and haunting because the thoughts and wondering never goes away. This is another reason I would like to get a DNA testing kit trying to find out if they were related to each other.
I have found everyone else on both sides of the family. But supposedly no one knows anything about my father. And no one seems to really care. Well I do care as strange as that sounds to some people. He is a part of me and I am part of him. If it had not been for him and my birth mother I would not be here. This is something I seem to not be able to get others to understand.
Some of the information that I do have on the man I believe to be my birth father is his name is William John Baum Sr. His birthday is8Augusr1931. He was born in East St. Louis, Illinois. His parents were Helen (Koskie) Baum and Joseph Baum.
It would mean more to me than I can say to have the closure that this DNA testing kit could give me with the answers I would get.