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?