Brad Yule

So it was 2019, I was 48 years old, had been in my career for 25 years, had been married to my wonderful wife for 27 years, we had three great kids who were growing up too fast, and my parents were still alive, lived close by, together and still in our lives.

My life changed in March of that year with a text message.

My wife and I had done AncestryDNA several years before this,

just to kind of find out where we came from.

And through that, a woman had reached out to her trying to figure out how the two of us were related.

My wife gave her a ton of answers.

All of those got shot down after we sent them back to her.

And we were kind of at a dead end until this text message came through.

And when this text message came, everything was different because she had an answer herself.

She said that her sister had a baby boy born in 1970 in Dallas on my birthday, and she thought it was me and that my parents had just never told me they adopted me.

That sounds like a shock, and it was initially, and it really turned into kind of blowing it off and thinking this poor lady is out in left field and we gotta help her.

So we agreed we're gonna do some research, get her back on the right track, I'll look at my birth certificate, we'll figure some things out, and we'll help her out.

In less than 24 hours, all I had was more questions than answers.

I suddenly realized that my mom had never talked about being pregnant with me.

I had never had the mom guilt trip of, I was in labor for you for this many hours, and this is what you've done or how you treated me.

And I had never seen a picture of her pregnant.

So I came to the hard conclusion that at 48 years old, I was going to have to ask my parents if I was adopted.

I came up with a brilliant plan to call my dad's cell phone, because he never answers his cell phone, leave a message, and plan a lunch date where we can get together, talk, and eventually I'm going to weave into the conversation, hey, funny story, this lady says I'm adopted, that's not right, right?

For the first time, and as long as I can remember instead, he answered the phone.

So after a little small talk, I went to, hey, let's go have lunch together.