By admin 
I was 30 years old when I finally found out who my biological parents are.
I’ll never forget that moment.
It’s the fall of 2021, 8:30 in the morning. I’m sitting in a team meeting at the Patriots facility, all the way in the back, two seats away from Mr. Kraft. Coach Belichick is at the front of the room going over some game-planning stuff.
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All of a sudden my phone starts going crazy.
At first, it’s one buzz. So I’m like….
Whatever.
But then it’s….
Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz.
Short pause….
Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz.
It actually sounds like I’m getting an incoming call, just because of all the consecutive buzzes. So I’m trying to press the phone against my leg to muffle the noise.
Initially I assume it’s my wife, and that it’s some emergency. But when I look at the phone, there’s no name. It’s just texts from a number.
One I don’t recognize.
So I’m racking my brain.
Who is this? What’s going onnnnnn?!?!?
I decide to click on one of the text messages, and everything quickly becomes clear. Three days earlier I’d reached out to an investigator to try and find out about my birth family. This was that person getting back to me.…
Over and over and over again.
This must be something big, I’m thinking. Like.… This is it. This is when I learn the truth about EVERYTHING.
I can feel my heart beating inside my chest. But I’m not really sure what to do next.
I keep the phone down low by my side and click on an attachment to one of the texts.
A video pops up.
It’s a grownup holding the hand of a little girl.
Hmmmm.
It looks like they’re walking into a fast-food restaurant.
I move my head closer to the phone to get a better look. I’m squinting. Angling the phone in my hand. Looking close. Taking everything in. And, to be honest with you, in that moment? I don’t know….
I’m just really struggling to fully process what I’m seeing.
Before I go any further, let me pause here for a second and give you some background.
I’m a 35-year-old man who plays professional football for a living. I have a wonderful, loving wife, and two awesome little kids. Back in the early 1990s, when I was a newborn, I was put up for adoption.
And even though I ended up being adopted by an incredible family who has been loving and supportive to me ever since, I’ve always felt like there’s been a void in my life.
I don’t even fully know how to explain it. It’s really hard to put into words. But I guess I’d say it’s like … there’s just something you can’t describe that is missing, or that’s not fully there for you.
There will always be a part of me that feels like I don’t belong, if that makes sense. Like I do and I don’t, as weird as that sounds. So even in that supportive setting I grew up in, with a family that loves me, there’s still this feeling of abandonment, of something being missing for me, of not fully belonging. I feel like that’s always around for me. And it always has been. Now, mind you, it’s in the background. It’s not something that I think about every day, or all the time. It just pops into my mind every once in a while. It’s just kind of….
Lurking.
Fortunately for me, there’s been a lot of really good things that have happened in my life – from finding my way to a loving family, to marrying a wonderful woman, to having happy, healthy kids – that help to fill up, or at least bandage over, that void.
But that positive side of this definitely wasn’t a given. I could’ve very easily been treated like an outcast from the moment I arrived in my new family members’ lives. Because … I’m not really sure exactly how to put this, but let’s just say … I don’t exactly blend in seamlessly with them.
Even though my adoption was “closed,” and no information about my biological parents had been disclosed, I knew that I was adopted from the time I was young. We didn’t talk much about it as a family early on, but I just knew. I was raised in a huge family, with lots of cousins. And we were always getting together on the weekends, holidays, you name it. It wasn’t long before I realized that I didn’t look like any of the cousins I was running around with in the yard. I have a brother who’s about six-foot-eight, this super lanky white guy. I love him to death, but like … we look nothing alike. I’ll never forget this one time in high school when we were at Walmart paying for our stuff, and the checkout lady, she’s looking at the two of us and … she’s basically staring right through our souls. Then all of a sudden she’s like, “Wait … are you two brothers?”
We both just looked at each other and laughed our butts off.
“Of course!” my brother said. “Obviously!!!!”
So yeah, for the first 28 years of my life, that’s pretty much how it went.
Great family. Good people. Don’t look anything like me. But whatever. They love me and I love them, so it’s all good.
For that entire time, I’d never even really thought about finding anything out about my biological parents.
Then, in 2019, something big happened. My wife gave birth to our first child. And it was this amazing, emotional, life-changing experience. Something I’ll never forget as long as I live. But afterward, the doctors came up to me and started asking a bunch of questions. Things that I wasn’t expecting at the time. It was like….
“How many siblings do you have?”
“Do any diseases or chronic illnesses run in your family?”
“Any history of heart problems on either of your parents’ sides?”
They basically wanted to know about any and all family health issues to test for and monitor in our newborn. So just question after question after question.
I couldn’t answer a single one.
All I could say was like.… “I don’t know. I don’t have that information. I was adopted.”
And, honestly, that made me feel stupid. I felt like I was a bad parent for not being able to provide that information, and for not having any medical records at all. Luckily, our son didn’t have any big medical issues, but me not being able to help his doctors by providing family history that could be useful in the future … that always stuck with me.
The wheels started turning a year or so later, when I decided to sign up with a genetic-testing company, just to see what would come back, and if the information might be beneficial to our family. My father-in-law, who was also adopted, had tried out this testing service, and he ended up learning about his biological mother and a sister, and it all went really well for him. They actually got in contact and developed a great relationship. But I also had a couple friends who had used the same service to find long-lost siblings, and it was kind of more hit-and-miss. Sometimes it went great when meetups occurred, other times it ended up being a disaster.
I figured I’d give it a try and see how it went.
When I sat down and dug into the details that came back, I found out that I had paired with a sibling. I was given all the information for this person, along with details on a bunch of cousins who I was also related to from my biological parents.
I didn’t reach out to anyone. I just kind of let it marinate. I knew that everything I was doing was private, and that I had the information I needed if I ever decided to make any connections. I wasn’t in any rush.
But when my wife told me in 2021 that we were pregnant with our second child, I knew the time had come for me to take some action. I needed to know about my family background. For our children’s sake. It was like: If this is something that could help ensure my kids stay healthy throughout their lives, or is something that they’d want to have available to them as they grow up, then I’m doing it. No matter how uncomfortable things may get.
So I did some research, and then I reached out to someone I trusted, someone who specialized in these types of scenarios. I asked them to help me locate my biological family members in a discreet way, so that I could hopefully get those details about my family health history. I gave the investigator all the information I’d received from the genetic-testing company, I signed a retainer, and then I figured I wouldn’t hear anything about it for a few months.
Three days later … my phone’s blowing up like crazy a few feet away from Mr. Kraft in Foxborough.
I paused the video of the adult and child walking together after the first few seconds and put the phone back in my pocket. When the team meeting ended, I immediately went to the chair at my locker and dove back into the texts.
I received something back from the investigator so fast that I hadn’t even gotten the chance to save their name in my phone yet. But it turned out that the person I hired found one of my parents almost immediately. So they went to where this person lived and made some videos of them going about their day. The investigator had put together a packet with tons of information on this person, as well as others he had found out about – biographical details, various documents, photos, videos. Everything was organized and logged. That’s what hit my phone at 8:30 that morning.
That’s what all the buzzes were.
So much stuff came through in those texts, but for whatever reason I just kept watching that fast-food restaurant video again and again. At one point, I guess the person I hired had set up this tiny camera between a hamburger and some french fries, so as I’m watching I’m actually seeing the fries and a drink in the foreground. That’s literally what’s framing my first-ever views of one of my birth parents.
And the little girl? That was this person’s grandchild, I was being told. My niece.
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It was so surreal to be sitting there watching all that. So many thoughts were swirling around in my head. But I feel like the one that kept cropping up most was … I’m not gonna lie, it was….
Do they look like me?
At that point … I wasn’t even thinking about football anymore, to be honest with you. I’m pretty sure I was late to my next meeting, now that I think about it. I was just kind of in a daze, actually.
I remember calling up my wife at one point and telling her about everything I was seeing and reading, and how it was kicking up a ton of emotions within me. And she’s such a wonderful person. So solid. She just kept telling me to come home. She could tell it was … a lot. She wanted to help me through it all. But I couldn’t just leave the facility, you know what I mean?
So I basically just kind of sat with everything for the rest of the day. Didn’t tell any of my coaches or teammates. Just kept it to myself until I could get out of there and get home.
When I got back to the house after practice, me and my wife immediately did the exact thing everyone tells you not to do when you get blindsided with some big new piece of information. The thing I’m betting you probably would’ve done too, if you were in my shoes.
We fired up Google!
Obviously, right?
The two of us did a million different offshoot searches, going down every rabbit hole imaginable to find out even more information on these people. I don’t have Facebook, but my wife does, and so we looked on there, too.
Everything seemed to be moving so fast. And in a way it was like a mystery or an adventure, or whatever. But at the same time, it was also all just … very jarring. Seeing these people who are my flesh and blood for the first time in my life, and learning all this stuff about them all at once, over the course of literally just a few hours. My head was spinning.
It really did dredge up a lot for me.
Not to be too dramatic, but I think something I’ve always felt from a very young age, but that I’ve always had a hard time talking about is … betrayal. And I think that’s at least some of what I was struggling with while going through those materials. Even though I’m happy, and my family situation is really positive and loving, there’s still a feeling of betrayal and rejection deep down. Getting this new information just put all of that even more front and center. Literally one of the things that I found out that day was that I had biological siblings who weren’t put up for adoption … babies who were kept, in other words, while I was given away. And with something like that, at least for me, it’s like: Oh, OK, so you held on to THEM, but I was so meaningless that you could just get rid of me no problem?!?!?
And, on top of that, something that kept popping into my mind while we were going through everything was … and it’s sad to think about this, but like … I absolutely know that I wasn’t given real, pure love from birth. That type of love where a child is being held by his mom and his dad, and they are just so happy and overjoyed beyond words. For me … that was missing.
With me? The way I came into this world?
It was cold. Unloving. Hollow.
From the time I was very little, I had always been certain about that fact.
And it became even more clear to me as an adult, when I was able to become a dad myself, and do the whole skin-to-skin thing right away with our newborn children. That was, for me, the most special thing I’d ever experienced. And I absolutely know that when I was a newborn … I didn’t have that type of immediate bond.
My birth was more like a formality. It was transactional.
So all that stuff, all those feelings, and about a thousand others … that all came flooding into my head in real time as I went through all this information on my biological family.
But there was also another layer to all of this, believe it or not. A second batch of information. One that came in over email a few days later.
This time I found out that my other parent – the one who wasn’t shown at the fast-food restaurant – had died. But not just that. They were actually murdered.
Shot and killed. In cold blood.
And, for whatever reason, that one hit me the hardest. Just knowing they were gone. Like gone gone. Forever. Even though I never knew this person, and even though I was pissed about them discarding me, and even though they died a very long time ago … it still hit me super hard. I was going through all these press clippings from local newspapers describing how my parent had been killed, and, I don’t know what to tell you … it just really, really made me sad. It was like: Man, I never got the opportunity. And now I never will.
It was all definitely a lot to have to take in and process in a very short span of time. And the crazy part of it is … none of that stuff had anything to do with my sole reason for undertaking this whole process in the first place. It was all basically just extra feelings being stirred up, almost like collateral damage. But you know what, ultimately….
It was all worth it in the end.
The way I came into this world? It was cold. Unloving. Hollow. Kyle Van Noy
I remember at one point the investigator ended up calling me at home because, despite the fact that there was a ton of information that came through, we still didn’t have what we set out to get all along.
So we talked it over, and we eventually ended up deciding to contact my one living parent without me being named or directly involved, and make a request for that family health information. And, fortunately, we were able to get that done.
So I have everything now.
I have all the background and ancestry and health information anyone could ever want on my parents and siblings, anything my kids would ever need as they move through life. There won’t be any gigantic voids for them where they’re kind of left in the dark. I feel like they’ll be fully empowered going forward.
I’m so thankful for that.
It’s what this was all about. And I’m glad that, even with all the emotions and strong feelings and heartache that resulted from the process, I never lost sight of the reason why I was doing all this.
It was all for our kids.
The only remaining question now, of course, is whether or not I’m ever going to reach out to any of the people I learned about in the process of trying to ensure the wellbeing of my children.
And, you know what? Here’s what I can give you on that … the best that I can do:
We’ll see.
I know pretty much everything about these people now, so I could get in touch with any of them at any point. And I know for a fact that at least one of my siblings, one person in particular, from everything I have looked through … they seem like they’re truly a good person. Maybe even someone who I’d respect and be friends with, potentially.
But you never know for sure, right? I mean, I do not know this person. And sometimes things actually aren’t what they seem, you know what I mean?
So the reality is, right now, in this moment, as I’m sitting here writing this, I’m just….
I’m not ready to open up that door yet.
I’m not saying it’s never going to happen. But I am not ready for it to happen right now.
And, sure, maybe if it were just me involved here, yeah maybe I’d be more open to taking that leap and just going all in and giving some new family relationships a shot. Like: Hey, why not? Let’s see what happens. This might be fun!
It’s not just me we’re talking about here, though.
It’s my wife, my children, everyone I’m close to. The decisions that I make, the relationships I build, all those things impact all the people who I love the most. And once I open those doors, it’s not like I’d be able to shut them and have everything be forgotten, you know what I mean? Once those doors open, it changes things forever. So this is not the type of decision to be taken lightly.
My wife’s been super supportive the entire time, and she has let me know that she’ll support my decision either way. We’ve had lots of conversations about it, and I’m sure we’ll continue to do that going forward. Our kids are still too young to process any of this stuff, but maybe at some point down the line they’ll become part of those conversations as well.
More than anything, I really just want to make sure that I’m doing whatever’s best for my wife and our children. I love them all so much.
But who knows, maybe at one point in the future we’ll all get together, sit down on the couch, and take a vote on it as a family. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see where things go from here.
So yeah, I don’t know, I guess ……… to be continued.
This article was originally published on ThePlayersTribune as Hard to Put Into Words.
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This story was originally published July 30, 2026 at 6:48 AM.