By this point in time, with two DNA tests under my belt, I was keenly aware that a sizable waiting game had just begun. Soon, I would be able to largely toss the test to the back of my mind as I waited, filling my thoughts with other aspects of my life–mostly work, making time for friends (if I was lucky), going on a date or two, and my penchant for absorbing copious amounts of online television.
Before getting to this stage, while it was fresh on our minds and we were both still home for the holidays, my brother and I traded wild ideas on our how our biological paternity came to be.
Part of me still couldn’t fully accept that my Dad was not my biological father, and entertained the idea that, perhaps, he was adopted. To this day, it is still a (slight) possibility, given that he has not yet been tested. After all, even if my parents DID use a donor, given that my parents were still being intimate, there WAS still a possibility–however small.
One night, in the kitchen, I shared this thought with my brother. His eyes lit up, and he told me he had something to show me. He ran upstairs to retrieve something, then came back down bearing an old photo album. It was my paternal Grandmother’s. After flipping through the pages, he landed on a picture of a man I’d never seen before–but it felt like I had. James asked “who does that look like?”
I swear to God, the man looked just like my Father.
We both marveled for a minute, then continued to fervidly discuss. He then flipped to another set of pages, showing me a particular set of pictures featuring my Father with his two brothers as young men (at one of their weddings). I was immediately struck by how similar my uncles looked to one another, yet how different my father looked from them. As a reminder, my Dad’s side of the family is Jewish. In these pictures, the traditional Jewish features (almost middle eastern, even) appeared to be quite pronounced in his brothers, but remarkably muted in my Father. His complexion was significantly lighter, and, despite his dark hair and eyes, he had a much more “European aristocrat” look to him. His nose, while admittedly on the longer side, was perfectly straight, and the remainder of his features soft. Notably, he looked eerily similar to the photo of the man my brother had shown me just minutes before.
We continued to flip through the photo album, searching for a clue as to who this man may have been, and for other clues. We didn’t find anything else about the man, but I did notice something else interesting–while there had been photos of my Grandmother while she was pregnant with her first two sons, there was not a single photo of her pregnant with my Father. I asked my brother, who over time had essentially become our family’s master “keeper of photos” (and had painstakingly been digitizing them over the years), whether or not he had come across any photos of my Grandmother pregnant with our Father. Given his incredible long-term memory for details–sometimes encyclopedic in nature–I trusted that he would remember if so. He hadn’t.
Could it be possible? I already knew that my Grandmother was a remarkable woman, born far ahead of her time, and with the largest, fullest heart I had ever encountered. 4/7 of her grandchildren are not biologically related to her, and yet she NEVER for a second treated any of us any differently–I even distinctly remember her telling each one of us (unbeknownst to the rest) that we were her “favorite” grandchild (and not to tell the others!). She made us each feel incredibly special and loved, and we adored her for it. She was also incredibly strong-willed and independent–for 20 years after her husband died, she lived on her own on the 15th floor of an apartment complex in New York City (traveling to Florida in the winters)…shopping, cooking, and cleaning for herself–fully unassisted. I distinctly remember a conversation I had with her in New York when she was telling me a bit about her life as a young woman…she mentioned that from a young age, she always knew that she had wanted to have children, but she also knew that she WOULD have them–at any cost–even if she couldn’t find a husband. For a woman born in 1919, she was tremendously progressive!
I also knew that she had a miscarriage after her second child, but before my Father was born. Could she have wanted another child, but couldn’t handle the possibility of another miscarriage, and decided to adopt? Or was she having trouble conceiving with my Grandfather, and possibly had an affair in order to have their last son? She was a feisty one, after all! (I say this, of course, with tremendous love and respect) From my understanding, my Grandparents loved each other, but things were not always rosy between them…
This was one set of theories we held. Even if it were true, it certainly wouldn’t guarantee that my Dad is my biological Dad…but the more and more I explore the world of genealogy and DNA, the more common the world of “non-parental events” becomes.
There was another theory that my brother held, too. This one I was far less convinced of, but it’s not ENTIRELY without merit. I won’t give too many details, out of respect for our family’s anonymity and some particularly sensitive natures of the situation, so forgive me for being a bit vague.
A while later, James told me he wanted to show me another picture. He pulled up a picture of our other brother, Adam, playing the guitar–“who is this?” “Adam”, I replied. But it wasn’t my brother. James corrected me–it was another member of the family, related by marriage, who had passed about 10 years before (we’ll call him “David”), when he was around our age. My eyes grew wide as I looked again, then hurriedly compared the photo to pictures on facebook of Adam–I hated to admit it, because it made no sense to me for a thousand reasons, but he was right–the resemblance was uncanny.
I was quick to resort to denial and disbelief…this was someone who was very close family (although, again, via marriage), close enough that it would in no way make sense for my parents to have chosen him without his spouse (our blood family)’s consent–and she sure as HELL didn’t know about this (we even discussed it later, and I trust her willingness to tell me the truth with my life). Plus, he would have been only about 18-19 years old at the time, and NOT married into the family yet–two more reasons for this to be an incredibly implausible choice, even though he did have a good relationship with my parents (at that point in time he had only known them for a few years). I also explained to my brother that the volume of relative matches I had online seemed exceptionally high, much more so than would be expected from a one-time donor, AND this man had known Native American ancestry–which appeared nowhere in my results.
That said, I did concede that it was possible that the three of us, or some combination thereof, had different donors (which is possible, even with triplets). Since my Mother had been on fertility drugs that caused her to release multiple eggs within the same cycle, rather than just one, it was POSSIBLE that if she were inseminated more than once during that same cycle with different sperm samples (say, to increase the chances that at least ONE of the samples would work), the different eggs could have been fertilized with different sperm. Hell, in that case scenario, it was even possible that my Dad “got lucky” with one of our eggs, and the donor (or donors) got lucky with the others.
And so the conspiracy theories continue…
Several months later, at a July 4th celebration with my Mother’s side of the family at my Aunt’s house, a family friend (who had been the best friend of this man before he passed) approached James and I, exclaiming how when he first saw Adam crossing the lawn, he couldn’t believe his eyes because had been convinced that he was seeing his friend David. James and I quietly laughed it off, and while I still didn’t (and don’t) believe the connection could possibly be–it’s far too extreme of a scenario–it was, admittedly, an unsettling resurgance of the “what if?” feeling.