After Overcoming Foster Care Trauma at 50, Woman Discovers the Man Who Landed Her in the System Wasn't Even Her Dad (Exclusive)

Growing up, Christie Werts always felt a little different from the rest of her family. She was more sensitive than everyone else, and her thinner skin didn't make her rocky upbringing any easier, especially when her parents' struggles with addiction landed her in foster care. She grew up without much, though she was deeply ambitious and driven. Werts wanted more, and she couldn't relate to her dad's acquiescence to a life with so little.

And then there was the obvious: she looked different. She had no relatives with her same cleft chin, and her lighter skin tone was shared only by her mother, who died when Werts was 28.

"I just grew up in a very Mexican family and I was like the random White kid," Werts tells PEOPLE exclusively. "Even going to playgrounds when I was a little kid, my dad would have the cops called on him, because I really looked nothing like my dad."

It wasn't until Werts was 50 years old that her paternity questions were answered. Despite how long she'd wondered, the reality still rocked her. Her past, present and future had been so thoroughly shaped by his presence in her life. As it turns out, her father — the one who was similarly sensitive and shared pieces of her appearance — had actually be absent all along.

Werts was 14 when she entered foster care, an experience that shaped her perspective on — and rejection of — adoption as an adult. She swore she wouldn't get involved with the system again. Then one boy's life took a tragic turn of a events, and Werts reassessed her own trauma.

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In 2021, her husband's ex-wife died shortly after giving birth to a son. As Werts told PEOPLE this past July, her empathy and love for the baby, named Levi, instantly trumped the pain she held onto from childhood. Werts and her husband cared for the infant, and they officially adopted him just before his second birthday.

"It was a little bit of a healing and emotional time having to become a foster parent when you were a former foster kid," Werts previously reflected. Plus there was the fact that Levi's biological mother also struggled with substance use, just like Werts' parents did.

But after all that she overcame — as she shared in multiple viral TikToks and her book, Life's Sad Story, God's Love Story: Transforming a Child's Adversity into a Tale of Love — Werts' story twisted once again.

In March, her dad's death pushed Werts to reevaluate their fraught relationship. She felt love for him. She grieved his death. But up until the very end, he treated Werts the way she looked and felt — different from the rest of the family.

Werts says her dad cut her out of his will shortly before he died. He decided to give everything to her brother; the two men looked completely alike, as one might expect with close relatives. So Werts bought a 23andMe DNA test.

"I was like, 'Man, I'm curious if he's even my dad.' He just treated me crummy my entire life," she tells PEOPLE. "Also I was just curious about what other family was out there on my dad's side ... We only knew a selective amount of people. So I guess it was a little bit of curiosity, but I still didn't expect [what] showed up."

For so long, Werts' Mexican heritage played a major part in her cultural identity. But the DNA test revealed she's Italian, British and French. There were zero traces of Mexican ancestry in Werts' analysis.

Her mom, however, had always claimed to be half-Mexican. But Werts had reason to doubt her late mother's paternity, too, after hearing from an estranged aunt earlier this year.

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"She called me when my book came out, and she was like, 'I hate to tell you this, but you're not full Mexican. Your dad might be Mexican, but there is rumor that your mom wasn't our dad's kid,' " Werts recalls.

She wanted to know more about where she was from, what that meant and who she was, but the first analysis could only take her so far. She decided to send off her DNA sample to Ancestry in the hopes of finding more relatives. The second test revealed what she had long suspected but never really expected to learn.

"It showed 'parent-child relationship' and gave the name of this person who was not my father," she tells PEOPLE. "My heart came out of my chest when it popped up."

She remembers shaking when she opened the results early one morning. She'd considered the possibility that she wasn't her father's biological child, especially given their physical differences, but seeing the proof sent her into "a tailspin," says Werts.

"My whole life flashed in front of me. I was like, 'My God, this guy was crappy to me, and he wasn't even my dad,' " she says. "My whole life, this man, who landed me into foster care and was just so terrible to me growing up, wasn't even my dad."

She then thought of her mom, who abandoned Werts and her brother in daycare when they were young children, only to return years later for irregular appearances in their lives. Her mother didn't get sober until Werts was an adult, well after her tumultuous childhood and teen years spent in foster care.

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They had a "little relationship" relationship before she died, but Werts most remembers the way her mom used to make jokes about her paternity. It was a hard reckoning, but with those results, she concluded that her mother had known all along.

"She just left me with a man that wasn't even my dad. And then I landed into foster care, and it turns out he wasn't even my dad," Werts says.

She didn't hesitate to reach out and contact the person Ancestry listed as her parent. Says she felt like she had to call, because she "didn't know the backstory."

"My mom was such a character. I thought, what if she met a man and had a relationship and she gave a fake name or something like that, and then just left one day and he knew she was pregnant, and he always wondered what happened to his kid," she tells PEOPLE. "I had nobody to answer any of those questions."

There were "moments of guilt," she admits. "Even though my dad was crappy, I still loved him, and he raised me when my mom left." But Werts was sure she wanted to know more about her biological father, whose existence she'd only just discovered. It turns out he spent the last 50 years the same way she had: completely oblivious.

"He does not remember my mom. It was a one-time one-night-stand back in the end of 1973. They met at a bar," Werts says, repeating what she learned from their first conversation. "And then he was married. He's been married for 50 years now."

Her biological dad — who is in his 70s — ended up having kids about 10 years after Werts was conceived. She says that fact has further complicated his reaction to the news, especially considering Werts' rough childhood.

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"He is completely screwed up over it almost, because he was a good dad to his kids," she explains.

With the support of her husband, Werts is working through her mixed emotions. One day she'd like to meet her biological dad, though regardless, the mere discovery of him has affirmed so much for her.

"Even if we didn't speak, I feel like I got so much more validation, because I felt like I just never fit in, not just physically, but emotionally, too," Werts shares. "My biological father and I have so much in common. He's very sensitive and he's very caring. We were both in the military, and nobody in my other family were in the military."

He has her same cleft chin too. "I always thought I looked like my mother, but now that I see pictures of him, I look more like him than I do anybody," she adds.

"I sent him pictures of me when I was younger, and I sent a group family picture. He was like, 'I thought for a minute, man, you look so much like my mother.' And then he sent me a picture of her, and I do look like her," Werts notes. "It's just crazy to see these people that you didn't even know, and you look like them."

After adopting Levi and peeling through her life story to write a book, Werts has come a long way. This unexpected new chapter has opened fresh wounds and closed old ones, giving the Ohio-based mom plenty to navigate emotionally, including a host of "what if?" questions left unanswered.

"In a sense it's a little bit healing [after] wondering why I always felt a little different," she explains to PEOPLE. "I feel the validation, but then I also feel sad ... Like what if he knew and I was raised differently?"

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She's also had to accept the inaccuracy of her Mexican heritage. It's a reality that's completely shifted her cultural identity.

"I identified everything [with being Mexican]. I had a very large Mexican family, even though I didn't look like everybody," says Werts. "Then all of a sudden, you [have] to mourn a little bit of that identity."

It took her a while to tell her brother and the rest of their relatives. Despite it all, she was met with warmth and acceptance. She says her brother reassured her, "You're still part of our family."

Maybe she didn't have to endure that trauma inflicted by her false paternity. Perhaps her childhood pain — which seeped into her adult life, then into motherhood — wasn't necessary. "But then I think, if I didn't have that course of life, I wouldn't have what I have now," says Werts.

"It's a very strange place to be, for sure," she continues. "If I knew what I had now and had to relive all that, I would probably do it again."

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