Back at my parent’s house, after being picked up by my brother, and knowing my parents would be out-of-town for a few days, I decided to scour the house for clues.  My parents have a room they keep as a library/study room, in which I knew there were a few filing cabinets were important information is generally kept.  I figured I’d start there.

What was I looking for?  Any health records related to our birth, the fertility doctor my parents had seen, really just anything that could lend a clue as to what in the heck was going on.  While I didn’t know for certain what scenario had led to my DNA results, MOST signs pointed to being conceived via sperm donation.  That being the case, I had started to conduct some (light) research into donor conception, and found that most donations are associated with a particular donor number that is indicated on the sample’s vial, which is also referred to as a “vial number”.  This is also the same number that is frequently used in searches between donors and their progeny, as well as between donor conceived half-siblings, etc.

Did I feel weird or guilty about going through that room (and, let’s be serious, the house) with a fine toothed comb?  Yes, a bit, but ultimately not enough to make me feel that it wasn’t my right, or at the very least worth the risk.  At that point in time, my parents had, on several occasions, essentially denied that there was anything out of the ordinary about our paternity, and had been pretty clear about not really wanting to discuss it further.  Also, the most likely case scenario (sperm donor) meant that this central information to who we (triplets) are had been intentionally withheld from us for over thirty years.  When the two factors combined, I honestly wasn’t feeling a lot of trust, and yet I desperately wanted to know the truth.  I wasn’t willing to risk asking the question of my parents and having them possibly lie again before I had the chance to first find out what information I could–what if they decided to lie, then, knowing I might be looking, destroyed vital paperwork?  I know it may sound crazy, but to me, hiding something that ultimately was MINE, my truth, my history, ancestry, biology–(my own DNA!) felt just as crazy, and the possibility of having the truth sealed forever was just too much of a risk for me to bear.

So, needless to say, I left no. stone. unturned.

I found a lot of interesting things, but no fertility paperwork, and no vial number.  This was pretty damn disappointing.  Over the course of my search, I had uncovered paperwork from when my Dad had cancer (including a brochure about cancer treatments and sterility), files on my brothers and I from infancy to our first three years documenting our health and progress on various childhood milestones (the hospita where we were born had taken a special interest in us given that we were triplets, fairly rare in the early 80s, and had been born 6 weeks premature), and mounds of just random other shiz.  Importantly, though, I did discover DNA test packaging that my mother had ordered years ago that I have TOTALLY forgotten about!  It was National Geographic’s “GenoGraphic Project”–not something I had come across so far in my limited research, but maybe it would at least give me her ethnicity breakdown (which also wasn’t ENTIRELY showing up in my genetic profile…the German aspect in particular seemed to be randomly absent, so maybe this would help explain that side of the mystery).

After carefully putting everything else away, I took the kit packaging and paperwork up to my childhood bedroom and googled the test to see if it was still possible to see the results.

It was, although the test turned out to yield a very different type of result from AncestryDNA and FTDNA…these results went back thousands and thousands of years to more or less the dawn of our species and provided a much more general, macro-level view of mass migrations.  Essentially, it wasn’t what I was looking for, which was also a bit disappointing.

That said, at least now I had a starting point for whenever I’d have my conversation with my Mom–she, too, clearly has an inherent interest in knowing her ancestry and understanding her roots.  This was our common ground.  Surely she could understand the desire to know your own biological history, and wouldn’t deny me the right and empathy to also know my own?

While I had been searching, my brother was out of the house, either at work or visiting a friend in Philly.  Later that night, when he returned, we ordered a pizza for dinner from our childhood Mom-and-Pop-Shop, picked it up, and brought it back to the house.  After chatting for a bit about other things, I turned the conversation toward the Ancestry.com family tree research I had been doing, which I’d been asking him to help me with over the past couple of weeks.  He’s also a big-time family history/research nerd, and even had his own Ancestry.com account and family tree going several years before.  He just never had the DNA piece.

As we talked, I grew a pit in my stomach, again feeling so completely conflicted about whether or not I should tell him what I knew.  Would he be upset to know?  Would this shake his foundation, his understanding of who he was, like it did me?  Not everyone wants to trade that feeling for the truth.  Or, at least, when there’s a possibility for it to be a choice, most people don’t want that kind of decision made for them.  In my case, by taking this test in the first place, I knew that there was a *possibility* that I would find something out I wouldn’t want to know.  Yet, in the end, I knew the risk (albeit wrongly calculated to be a small one), and ordered the test.  Also, I’m the kind of person who would rather know the truth, even when that truth is hard.  While, at the end of the day, I wish that I had received different results, ones that confirmed my nuclear family (and maybe, as a bonus, tossed in a few other countries into the mix!), I’m in no way sorry that I now know more of my truth.  It’s part of who I am.  To me, it’s my right, and it’s also not anything to be ashamed of.  If this is to be my truth, I at least want my hands on as much of the ropes of the situation as is possible.  The option to find out the full story–my full story.

And who was I to hide this from my own brother, to deny him this option, this right, too?  Some may say that if he really wanted to know, he could have taken a test himself.  To them, I say, “that’s true…partially“.   He and my other triplet brother have had no REAL reason to question our parentage. We’d been told that my Dad is my Dad and my Mom is my Mom.  We had no reason to question this or seek out an alternative, more complicated truth.  However, I newly possessed a reason for HIM to finally question what we’d always thought to be true.  As triplets, being conceived at the same time meant that my seeking out and then knowing my DNA’s truth inherently resulted in my knowing THEIR truth for them as well. By revealing the reason for them to question (explaining my own results), I’d also inherently be revealing the answer of their own paternity.

Sure, I could wait and see if they ever came up with and felt the question strongly enough to raise it on their own, and for them to come across the kinds of DNA testing platforms that I already had the privilege of knowing about (I was a BioBehavioral Health major, after all!), but I also knew that, at our age, our donor wasn’t getting any younger.  If they ever did want to pursue looking for and even connecting with this man, every day that I waited to tell the truth was another day that I’d have stolen from them.  That was time that could never be given back, a wrong that could never be righted.  Time to potentially find and build relationships with additional siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins.  If that WAS something they would have wanted, there was a time limit on that equation that just didn’t apply to the alternative.  Knowing, especially, that James had already asked my parents years ago about whether or not we had a different biological father–that he HAD asked that question, I knew that I couldn’t rightfully withhold this information from him–it wasn’t only mine to keep.  It belonged to each of them as much as it belonged to me.

This, of course, didn’t make it much easier to bring up to him–it certainly didn’t ease the guilt I felt toward my Dad.  My biggest fear, aside from potentially hurting my brother, was the possibility that he would reject our father as a result.  I wanted to protect my Dad from that possible outcome.  As much as I knew that, for myself, (and for them, in my mind), that knowing this new truth would never and COULD never replace my father–the man who raised us and, just more than that…in every way would always be our father–etched into the universe–I couldn’t predict how my brothers would feel, especially given their sometimes more tumultuous relationship with him.  God, just thinking about it again kills me.

But I also knew in my heart (my intuition is pretty strong) that while my brother would likely be just as curious as I naturally am about our “bonus” biological family, he would never forsake my father; the space in our heart for “Dad” had always been and will always be slated “occupied”.  Equally strongly I knew that my brother deserved to know the truth.

At this point, I don’t even remember *exactly* how I brought it up, but I knew that he already had the login information to my Ancestry account, which was linked to my AncestryDNA account.  This being the case, eventually he would see the truth on his own…and that wasn’t the right way for him to find out.  So, I asked him to tell me again about the time when he was sick and had asked Mom and Dad about whether or not Dad was our biological father.  He told me the story, from his perspective.  (Interestingly enough, it was a very different version than what my parents had told me at the time…but I guess every truth is filtered.)  I asked him if he ever still wonders about that, and he said that he did.  “Well…”, I said, and he replied “Why, did you find something out?”

I made him promise to keep what I was about to tell him between him and I for now, until we figured out what to do.  Then I told him what I knew.

Thankfully, from everything that I could tell, he took it really well–it was actually a surprisingly chill conversation , all things considered.  I think it was also a bit vindicating for him, too, to learn that his instinct in asking the question hadn’t been wrong.  I then told him about my fears in telling him, and how I feared how he would feel towards our Dad, and he confirmed that this doesn’t change who our DAD ultimately is.  DNA is no match for love.  In that moment, I was unbelievably relieved to finally have someone in the boat with me again, and to not have to keep a secret from him that was just as much his as it was mine.  We didn’t know how or when to tell our brother, (we’ll call him “Adam”), but I did tell James that I was planning on talking to Mom and Dad first, probably sometime that week while I was home.  I couldn’t continue to keep that closet locked any longer.

He agreed.