After getting home from visiting my Pop Pop with my Mom, I felt like I had such a heavy weight lifted off of my shoulders.  She had shared with me her truth (after, yes, some nudging) and ultimately still accepted me and my question.  She was even interested in learning more about my background with me, which made what I was feeling and experiencing feel a little bit more like a shared journey.  I had been so scared that she would back away from the question and/or make me feel guilty for asking.  I didn’t want my quest for the truth to ruin our relationship.  We had been making a lot of progress on building that back up over the years.  My teenage years in particular had been rough on our relationship.

As relieved as I felt on one shoulder, I still had an even bigger weight on the other.  The prospect of my father’s reaction.  I truly wouldn’t be able to handle it if my question were to destroy him.

A laundry list of anxiety-ridden questions filled my mind:

• Would I hurt him by telling him what I know?  What about if he knew I wanted to learn more?
• Would he disown me for my “disloyalty”?
• Would he wonder if I would feel any differently towards him after knowing this, fearful that he had just lost his daughter?

It pained me greatly to think of any of these options coming to fruition.  My Dad and I have always been very close–I’ve been a Daddy’s girl from the beginning.  I wanted him to know that I still am.

More than anything else, I couldn’t stand the idea that my Father could one day go to his grave wondering if we would ever have disavowed him of his fatherhood if we knew the truth.  If he would someday be stripped of that title.  I could not let that happen.  I could not let him wonder, not once, not ever.  I needed him to know that I loved and will always love him deeply, and that my DNA’s truths will never change the fact that he is my Father and the luckiest thing I have ever had in my life.

That same day, I told him I wanted to talk to him later, just him and me.  He asked me what was wrong–I said nothing, but that we could talk later.  He was getting more and more anxious, worried that there was something big going on.  The can was opened, and he wasn’t buying “later” as a conversation starter.

We sat down on the couch in the living room.

I started off by telling him that, before I said anything else, “You have to know that you are probably the closest person to me in the world, and one of the people I love most in this life, and there is nothing that could ever, ever change that…” I trailed off and started to cry. “This is really hard for me to say, because I’m so scared that you’re going to be upset with me.  I need you to know that this doesn’t change anything”.

My Dad huged me, and reassured me that he knows, and that everything is okay.  At this point he was pretty confused, but mostly concerned about whatever’s going on.

I explained to him how we both know how interested I’ve always been in our family’s history, becoming my generation’s historian (with my brother) at a young age.  “Yes”, he nodded and agreed.  I then went on to remind him of how I’d been working on our family tree through Ancestry.com’s website, and uncovering all sorts of cool documents and pieces of information about relatives in the past, and how fascinating it was.

Then I explained upgrading to the DNA test…and the breakdown of my results.  I didn’t have to get much farther than that and my confusion.  He stopped me there.

Dad: “Zeezado, I think I know where this is going.  Is there something you’d like to ask?”

I told him that I pretty much already knew, and that I (briefly) talked to Mom about it, and that it’s okay.  It changes some things about parts of my roots, but that it doesn’t change who he is and always will be to me, and it won’t.

With anguish on his face, told me that he was always so worried that we would be mad at him if we ever found out, for keeping this secret from us.  I told him I wasn’t mad, and he was so relieved.

He then told me that he had actually never known for sure if we were genetically his.  Apparently, after the procedure, the doctor had told him “go home, make love to your wife”, and essentially carry right along thinking the child is yours.  It COULD be, after all.  You’d never know.

Except now, I had ruined this ideology for my father.  Until that moment in time, he had still held on hope to the possibility that we were biologically his after all.  I felt awful, and immediately broke down further expressing as much.

My Dad assured me that while he did hold in the back of his mind that it was a possibility, he still knew the truth.  Like us, he had easily observed that, physically at least, we didn’t take after him…with our lighter hair and blue eyes (he has almost black hair and dark, hazel eyes).  He had known.  Even then, at a time that was probably even more emotional for him, he was consoling me.

THAT is the mark of a true father.

He went on to explain as my Mom came into the room with us that he and my Mom were advised by their doctor not to ever tell us, that it would do more harm than good.  He felt badly about this, but thought that the doctors knew what they were talking about, and that this was the right thing to do.  My brother,  James, then joined the room as well.  All four of us finally began to have an open conversation about it all.

It felt like freedom, and like love, sprinkled with remaining questions.

My Dad then wondered aloud what we should do about Adam, my other brother, who lived nearby but wasn’t there at the time.  Should we tell him?  Who, and when?

We figured that, at this point, it wouldn’t make sense or be fair to my brother if two out of three of us knew, but he did not.  We already felt badly that he would be the last to know.  My parents ultimately decided that they wanted to be the ones to tell him, and that they’d figure out a time to do it soon.

One sibling left to go.  Hopefully we could all be at peace with this news and move on.

After breaking the news to both my Mom and Dad, and finally having an open conversation between them and James, my parents decided that they wanted to be the ones to break the news to my other brother (the third of the triplets, Adam) themselves.

Part of me was fine with this, but part of me also wished that I could be there when it happened, too–partially so that I could help and serve as a buffer in navigating the conversation.  This felt like such a high-stakes conversation, such “big deal” news to learn about yourself, that I was feeling the need to protect my brother’s (potentially) “soon-to-be-shattered” worldview and conception of self, his core identity, and family ties.  I didn’t want him to hurt.  However foolishly, I thought that, somehow, if that message were delivered under my control, knowing the perspective (or at least one) of being in his waiting shoes, and having some empathy and understanding for my parents’ perspective as well, I might be better positioned to soften the blow and to help in healthily shaping his reaction.

Even more so than with James, I was concerned that Adam’s relationship with our father wouldn’t be able to survive the truth.  It already seemed to me to be tenuous, in many respects, and I was deeply fearful of the possibility that my brother could reject my father–our father.  The last thing that I wanted in going through this process of revealing the truth (and opening the door to finding out about previously unknown family) was breaking our own family in the process.  My parents didn’t deserve that.  They may not have been entirely truthful and forthcoming with us all these years about something seriously big, but they didn’t deserve rejection, and my father certainly didn’t deserve to lose a son.  A feeling, I’m sure, akin to a death.  Nothing was worth that, and so yes, my inner control freak was screaming and begging to be the one to (softly) deal the blow.  Maybe I could say it in a way that wouldn’t have to hurt so much, for any of us.

I also felt pretty badly that he was the last to know, and how he might feel about that.  I wanted to be able to explain how and why I approached each piece of our family puzzle in the way that I did, and that it had nothing to do with how much I care about him.  No one wants to feel excluded, especially not when the feeling is paired with a fundamental identity crisis.  Selfishly, I needed him to know that I never wanted to isolate him.

Why didn’t I tell him when I told James?  Well, for one thing, James was at home for the full length of my week-and-a-half long Thanksgiving visit, so purely from an opportunity perspective, there was that.  Also, James already had the log-in information for my Ancestry account, which was now inherently linked with my AncestryDNA account, so he was going to figure it out anyway–and that just didn’t feel like the right way for it to happen.  On top of that, based on James’ pre-existing interest in our family trees, genealogy, and research, I knew that this type of information–knowing and exploring one’s biological roots–was already important to him.  This was something he would want to know.  Finally, I knew that he had already asked these questions about our paternity in the past–so this was something he has at some point expressed an interest in knowing.

With Adam, I was going in blind.  I had NO IDEA if this would be something he would want to know, if given the choice.  I’m not even sure that anyone would really, truly be able to make an “informed” decision about whether or not they would want to know something like this about themselves even if they were given the opportunity to choose.  You might think you would want to know, but the reality and gravity of finding out, as an adult, that your father is not your biological father is something that I don’t think you can truly appreciate until you actually find yourself in that boat.

What if he wouldn’t have wanted to know?  How could I even gauge if he would (especially without letting the cat out of the bag in the process?)

Once I revealed what I knew to my Mom, everything after that happened so fast, and suddenly, for 4 out of 5 of us, the truth was already out on the table.  At that point, I didn’t feel like there WAS a “right move” in terms of if or even how to tell my brother.  And, before I even had a chance to verbalize my inner conflict about how to proceed, sitting in the living room with my Dad, Mom, and James after just having broken the news to my Dad, my Dad announced that he wanted my Mom and him to tell Adam together.

Honestly, at this point, I was so thankful that the Earth hadn’t exploded after this most recent reveal that I figured I’d throw my parents a bone and let them feel at least one small ounce of control over the limited remains of their secret.

I’ve felt tremendously guilty ever since.

Despite logically knowing that my own “locus of control” is, ultimately, limited, I can’t help but feel that I might have been able to help if I had been there.

It took my parents several weeks to tell him (apparently the times they were together before then were times when he was accompanied by his girlfriend, which they didn’t feel would be the best circumstance for a big reveal like this).  From what they told me about when they did, Adam didn’t seem to have a huge reaction (then again, neither of my brothers tend to be all that loquacious about their feelings).  He seemed to be “fine”.

After being told by my parents that Adam now “knew”, I texted my brothers, asking how they were doing with processing this whole thing.  Adam essentially said that he was doing fine, and just that it was a little “weird, haha”. I told him to call me soon so we could talk about it, but neither of us really followed up.  Ultimately, I was scared and didn’t want to rock the boat, and up until that point we hadn’t really been the type of siblings that typically confided our deepest feelings in one another, so I’m not sure that either of us even knew where to start.  So we let our busy lives fill the silence.

They did.  Going through this is a lonely process, especially since there are so few donor conceived folks out there (that are aware of their origins…estimates are that only about 10% of donor conceived (DC) folks are “in-the-know”).  The difference is that, in our case, I’m NOT 100% in this alone.  I DO have 3 former “womb-mates” who share this crazy situation with me.  But each of us process things differently, and as a result seem to still be going through our shared origin story individually.   We live across the country from one another, and so rarely talk.  What we seem to want from all of this moving forward seems, so far, to be different, too.  I just wish it didn’t feel like I’m still going through this alone.

After Thanksgiving, I received another message from my “new” mystery cousin, Jessie.

She wished me a Happy Thanksgiving, and said that she sent a note to one of her cousins in NJ asking if any family members had been a med student in the 80s.  It turned out that the only one who had been was female, so clearly that wasn’t the lead we were looking for.  She mentioned that since she grew up in California, she had limited contact with the other branches of the family, and thus limited information.  Jessie also mentioned that her father’s side of the family is Danish, which doesn’t seem to fit all that well with my predicted regional breakdowns provided by AncestryDNA, so that line was probably out, but that she saw some Canadian ancestry between some folks on her family tree and my Mom’s side of my tree.  Aside from this, she suggested that I try filtering for our “shared matches”, and then shoot some of those folks a message.  She gave as many details as she could throughout her message.

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In reading her reply, I honestly just felt overwhelmed.  I had been hoping against hope that Jessie would be the key to quickly unlocking this puzzle and finding the rest of my birth family, but when her response opened up more questions than answers (and the possibility that maybe this was a maternal match AFTER ALL), I was pretty bummed.

Looking back now (several months later), I realize that there are a lot more hidden gems of information in here than I originally realized.

At the time, I was still so new to DNA research and ignorant to how to conduct a search and put the puzzle pieces together.  I’m still currently putting the remainder of my search on hold until I can catch up on writing/processing what has happened so far.

Also at the time, I was about to start a new job, a temporary but demanding (and soon-to-be-crazy-busy) position at a school through the end of the school year.  I’ve never been very good at prioritizing my personal life over work life, let alone juggling the two, so, predictably, I feel into my old pattern of bottling up all the emotional shit I was dealing with and burying it to deal with at a later date.

Every now and again, I’d come up for air and conduct small late-night bursts of a search, usually when triggered by receiving some sort of notification from one of the genealogy platforms I was on.  One such occasion was when I finally received my “23andMe” results, on December 17th.

The results were nothing shocking–according to this breakdown, I’m still 99.9% European, 86% “British & Irish”, 12% “Broadly Northwestern European”, and miniscule percents of random other things.

My new list of matches was definitely the most exciting part, although, still, I had no way of knowing which new matches were paternal verses maternal.