Within the next 24 hours, I was able to schedule my appointment with LabCorps for the following Monday. It actually wasn’t all that easy to get an appointment—it can only be done when a paternity specialist is in the office, and specialists often don’t keep regular hours. Hell, they barely even keep banking hours! Also, I couldn’t get the test done in NYC since NY state doesn’t allow for these types of tests, at least not through LabCorps, anyway. That meant that I had to take a half day from work in order to go home and get the test done in Pennsylvania. He would be taking his test on the same day, a few hours later, but at a different location.
That morning, walking into the testing office felt unbelievably surreal. Here I was, a full-grown adult, telling the front desk staff that I had an appointment for a paternity test. And not for my child, but for ME.
The staff was nice and minimally awkward about it.
They asked me for my license and social security card (you had to have certain types of official identification, although those weren’t the only options). After signing in and checking my forms of ID, they asked me to have a seat in the waiting area.
A TV was on, although muted. I caught up on the morning’s news as if it were any kind of normal morning.
After a few minutes, I was brought to a patient room by two nurses. One would be facilitating the test while the other would serve as an official witness. They took my thumb-print and had me fill out a form indicating that I was who I said that I was. I was allowed to excuse myself to the restroom in order to wash the ink off my hand, but unfortunately someone else was in there and not coming out anytime soon. Whelp, I guess I’ll have to go to work with ink on my hands!
It was probably the most official and organized process I had ever seen in my life. They weren’t messing around. Fortunately, they were friendly despite the necessary formalities.
From there, they took my picture with some kind of polaroid-esque camera. I wasn’t really sure whether to smile or what. Do most people smile when they get their paternity test identify confirmation picture taken?! Would anyone ever even see this picture? What will happen to the snapshot of this surreal and life-altering moment in my life? I wondered if it would be submitted in a file to my sister K since she was the one who ordered the test. Otherwise I suppose it will be locked away in a filing cabinet somewhere indefinitely.
It was then time to collect my cheek swab. The nurse circled several q-tib swabs, one at a time, across four corners of my mouth as I looked around the room. All in all, this key procedure that would tell me the answer to my year-long search took about 30 seconds to complete.
Once they were all set, they told me to have a nice day and sent me on my way. Like I was waiting to receive vitamin D level results. I’m sure they don’t have to do something like this for an adult every day.
I walked out of the building, keeping my composure, and then sat in my car. Before turning the key in the ignition and resuming NPR, I briefly allowed myself a moment to feel the gravity of the situation. The test had been submitted. It’s really happening. Whether I wanted the results at this point or not, the truth was coming—there was no turning back.
During my train ride back to NYC, I was a wreck. The guilt of the 5% chance that I might be wrong weighed heavily on me.
What if I just put this other family through hell (and some kind of hefty fee for this test) for nothing, just because I was overconfident in my searching abilities? What if I missed a key detail and ended up looking like an idiot—or worse—a lunatic?
And what if after ALL of this, after being SO close to the truth, I was back at square one of my search? If it’s not him, then it has to be someone who was adopted out of this family themselves. And if that’s the case, then it will be virtually impossible to EVER find him. How would I live with knowing that I would never know? And how could I possibly ask anyone else in this family to trust me and test again if I was wrong? How could they not hate me for my carelessness in my search? Now that I had been getting to know my probable half-siblings, they had become real to me—people I would want in my life—not merely names on a screen. If it turns out that they’re actually my cousins and I drug them through this mess just to find that out, I can’t imagine that they’d ever want me in their lives again in any capacity. I’m already only about one foot in—a “relative stranger”—maybe in that case it would just be easier for them if I remained nothing more.
And yet the thought of never getting to meet my “new” family members, even if they were “just” cousins…just felt like an unbearable reality. To NEVER have the chance to know them. I had come so far and only wanted to feel like I had some sort of meaningful connection to the family that anonymous donor conception and the fertility industry had denied. I wanted to be able to reclaim in some way the relationships that had been taken from me as a condition of my existence. That condition was a man-made one, not a condition of the spirit. No one had any right to place it on anyone else, especially not in a way that was planned in order to cater to potential insecurities that were for sale. I desperately wanted to finally feel connected to and, yes, welcomed by the common generation that our ancestors produced, even if I would always be a little different.
What if all of that was at risk? Just thinking about my great grandparents and knowing that as “untraditional” as my origin story was, and even though I was raised apart from their progeny, I am technically every bit as much equally tied to the same bloodline—to Mary Ethel and Robert Edwin. They had never given their permission to any doctor for me to be cast permanently out of the family line forever. Our history is mutual and stories intertwined, even if we had never known until now.
At the same time, everyone has the right to choose (as adults, anyway) who they do and do not want to involve in their life. And if I wind up hurting Keith’s family by being wrong about this admittedly somewhat crazy-sounding way that I’m connected to them…then yes, of course they would have every right to not want to be reminded of it by my presence. Heck, even if I’m right it very well may hurt just as much. To have to accept the good with the bad—that my brothers and my link to them had been produced via an incredible violation of their trust (even if accidentally) by the same doctor who had helped them have their own three children—even that is a big ask to trade for the truth. I’m lucky that my probably half-siblings (and perhaps my biological father, their Dad, as well?) even see any good in this at all.
The biggest “good” of all of this was arguably for my brothers and I—to gain our existence—and my parents to gain the family they’d always longed for. Not only did Keith never consent to having any additional children out there, and certainly not by a woman who was not his wife, but he also literally took NO action that would have made him responsible for impregnating anyone else. They say it takes two to tango in the culpability for an unintended pregnancy, but in this instance, it took quite a bit more than that—and yet absolutely ZERO irresponsible action on his end. Those samples were to be used exclusively on his wife. And she didn’t deserve or consent to any of this either. The half of us that is genetically his had always been intended to be combined with her. And yet that same half of me that is his, and not my Mother, was also technically supposed to be some other unknown man out there. Nonetheless, fate would have it otherwise, that I am me.
I never meant to hurt anyone to exist. And while my existence is perhaps half borrowed, it is still real. I am human, and as any human, regardless of the fact that I am proud to have only one Mom and Dad—the parents who raised me and the only two people who will ever hold those irreplaceable spaces in my heart—I still have a natural drive to know BOTH biological halves of the people where I come from. And their families.
Those answers are only days away. Would any of us be ready for them? How could we be?
My sister, C, send me a message shortly after my appointment letting me know she was thinking of me. She hoped that all went smoothly and that I would have a safe trip back to NYC. I let her know that everything went just fine on my end.
Later that day, I checked in to see if everything went smoothly on Keith’s end, too. It did.
Anxiously, I explained how sorry I was in advance if it turned out that I was wrong about all of this. My sister K assured me that it seemed very unlikely for that to be the case. I agreed, and remembered that the last of our great-grandparents’ lines to test, “Rachel”, had a descendant pop up on my match list through MyHeritageDNA several weeks before. When I checked where she fell on the family tree, I was able to confirm that her genetic distance in centimorgans from me made it impossible that her line held my biological father. The only exception would be if it turned out that Rachel was born out-of-wedlock herself, and thus only biologically related to her mother, which seemed unlikely. Granted, anything is possible and more and more people are finding out about such things with the advent and popularity of commercial DNA testing, but still. Chances were good that this just pointed even more clearly that I had done my DNA homework correctly.
So now it was just time to wait. Except it wouldn’t be quite as easy to bury the wait as far back in my mind as before. This time, I would only have a few days—a week, tops—before the results were back, unlike the months of waiting that I had been used to with the various commercial DNA tests. At least I was guaranteed that my 12+ hour work days would keep me busy.
No matter what was about to happen, at least the result of all of this insanity was that I AM alive, have had a pretty great life, and now have even more family in it. That’s not nothing.
And so we wait.