Adriana Jessica Bonner, 34, was able to track down her father because of the AncestryDNA test and she gained a new family.
Not all families are biologically related and not all biologically related people should be called family. Sometimes, birth parents can be the biggest disappointment for a child. Even after they are adopted, it can leave a scar in their hearts and minds.
One woman, Adriana Jessica Bonner, 34, a mother-of-three has had a happy family growing up. She was adopted by loving parents but she wanted to find her biological parents. That brought her to some harsh realities about the people who had her. It also brought her happiness since one of the parents accepted her. Unfortunately, her father had not known that she existed until she contacted him.
Adriana was known as Baby Jessica when she was found in a pink-striped bag in a watery ditch on Triangle Mountain, Canada by three 15-year-old boys on April 14, 1986. She had been crying and they found her on their way back from school. Adriana was lucky that she was found or she would have perished. The police figured that when she was found she had been only a couple of hours old, as per Times Colonist.
Her birth mother, who doesn't want to acknowledge her even now, was only 17 at the time. She was scared and told Adriana that she has no memory of how her infant landed up in the ditch.
Adriana tried a genetic genealogy test through AncestryDNA and found a relative on her father's side. That second cousin, Doug, connected her to her father, Rick, 54. He grew up in Victoria and moved to Elmira, Ontario 20 years ago. He has been married to Rhonda for 25 years and has two daughters. He only found out about Adriana in March when his cousin called him for the first time in three decades.
"Doug asked if Adriana could contact me," Rick said. "I told him to wait. I told him I dated a girl around that time. ‘Let me check with her first.’ I didn’t want to give anybody any false hope."
So, he got in touch his ex, who denied it. "I asked her, 'That baby that was found on Triangle Mountain, did that have anything to do with me and you?’ She said, 'Absolutely not. We weren’t even dating then.' I said, 'OK. I didn’t mean to offend you and I apologize for having to ask this, but this girl is reaching out to me and she’s saying she’s related, so I just want to make sure before I talk to her. She said everything was good and I had nothing to worry about."
Unfortunately, she lied but Adriana and Rick did DNA testing anyway and realized that he was her father. "I bawled like a baby. We all cried. And we decided we’d meet Adriana sooner than later. I want to see her now," said Rick.
Adriana, who lives in Edmonton, drove to Falkland, in British Columbia to meet Rick and his family. She was welcomed with open arms and Rick wants her to be a part of his life now.
“When we met, there wasn’t a night that we went to bed before 3 a.m. We stayed up, talking about stuff, just trying to make up for lost time,” said Rick, who was thrilled.
Her biological mother, on the other hand, has been shutting her out completely. She never told her family that she was pregnant and claimed that she was in denial at the time. In a letter, she told Adriana, "I am truly sorry for how your life started. I think I was in such denial about everything that I truly believed I wasn’t pregnant until I went into labor that morning. It was the scariest thing to go through not knowing what was going on and being by yourself."
"I remember the pain I was in, I remember having you and cleaning you up and dressing you and wrapping you up so you would be warm, I went and cleaned myself up and the mess and came back and lied on my bed with you crying, shaking and not knowing what to do. My intention was to take you to the little church down the street where I knew you would be safe and sound," she added.
Rick and Adriana are angry that she was left in a ditch and Adriana's birth mom might be facing a charge of abandonment under the 1986 Criminal Code too. Meanwhile, the woman who was once called Baby Jessica just has forgiveness in her heart.
"I never knew how strong I was until I had to forgive someone who wasn’t sorry, and accept an apology I never received," she said.
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