Just in time for the holidays — a story that sounds like it could be a movie of the week.
TikToker Lane (@laneiscool14) shared a video she made telling the story of a DNA test that ultimately revealed her biological father.
Buckle up, folks!
“This f*cking text message right here changed my life forever,” Lane says pointing to a screenshot of a text from an unknown number.
“About a year ago now, on Jan. 9, I get a text message telling me to get a DNA test from Ancestry. And I think it’s fake, I FaceTime my friend, and I’m like, ‘Listen to this.’ And she’s like, ‘I swear my gut is telling me this is real. You need to respond.’ So I respond, and then they write me back,” she continues.
“I was shook that they responded,” Lane adds, showing another part of the text conversation. “I let them know I had already done 23andMe the year before because it was on sale. I was hoping I was gonna find that I was like secretly exotic or related to royalty, but I’m just English and Irish like I thought I was.”
Lane said that the person behind the texts tried to contact her and her husband on a burner Facebook account.
“They would not provide me with any sort of proof that this was real, and, obviously, I called my mom immediately, saying, ‘What the f*ck.’”
Well, Lana’s mom had some news for her.
“My mom always told me this story that she was an alcoholic and my dad was a cheater. So when I called her, she says, ‘I know exactly what you’re talking about, I had an affair.’ I almost fell off my f*cking chair,’ Lane says in the video. ‘She had an affair with a guy ten years younger than her when she was in college. It was a one-time thing, but he even saw her on campus and said, ‘Is that mine?’ and she denied it.”
After her mother told her the story, Lane ordered an Ancestry test and then waited for the results. She found out that yes, the man who texted her is her father.
“I find out that, yes, this man is my father. So I message him immediately, and he lives in California. He’s British. What the f*ck? He said my mom sent him a Christmas card when I was two years old, saying my name in it and that he’s googled my name ever since. He followed me on social media my entire life. He watched me date my boyfriend, get married, have babies, everything, all from the outside, not able to know me.”
Lane made a follow-up video explaining that her biological father tried to keep up with her life over the years from afar.
She said he even called her workplace to hear her voice. And he wanted to get a haircut by her at the salon she worked at, but his wife said that was probably not the best idea.
The situation has shaken Lane and affected her relationship with her mom.
“You can imagine a secret of this magnitude requires a lot of lying and betrayal and manipulation to keep it up for this long. Cutting my mom off was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Never would I have ever expected it. We were like this [crossed fingers] growing up. I used to tell people she was my soulmate,” Lane says.
When Lane met up with her biological father, it was not exactly what she expected. She left the meeting feeling “stupid” and she said they didn’t make a ton of eye contact. But commenters said it could just be a cultural difference — maybe his being British or just less open.
“Our interactions left me feeling very confused, very invalidated. I was there for like five days. We met up once or twice a day to hang out and go out to eat or something and every time I felt like I was prying information out of him and I just felt like he didn’t like me.”
“I was A-OK until the last day, and then I got very emotional because I guess I was just hoping by the last day it would be different and when it wasn’t, it was just hard. So here I am back in New York, and yeah, I hope that our relationship continues to get better,” she says.