Mom, you could have told me

I had a DNA surprise about eight months ago. 

I'd done the test, my second, only because I wanted to have my DNA results on the same platform as all my family research, and wasn't expecting any surprises. 

But there was a big surprise. My dad wasn't my biological father. 

Since then, I've had many, many conversations with friends and acquaintances about that discombobulating discovery. 

People have different reactions to my news, maybe because it's being filtered through their own memories of this thing we call Dad, and how they feel about the dad they got. Some have asked how I felt about discovering that my mother had not been "faithful." 

Neither of those things mattered to me personally.  My dad was my Dad, no thoughts otherwise. He was a dad of his times, and yes, I had a period of being angry with him in my reflective 50s for never showing up to any of my piano recitals. But he was unwaveringly on my side through each one of my painful life cycles, from start to finish and without question. That's a Dad.

As for expectations of monogamy, they've always struck me as just painfully in denial of human behaviour. Our great big family on my mom's side has some classic stories of profound human-beingness in our history, and I've always loved those stories the best. 

In my case, everybody is dead who might have more details on this DNA surprise, but at least an aunt remained who remembered the affair, though not nearly with the level of detail I would have liked. 

It turns out that getting your head around the fact that half of your genes are not what you thought is quite a big thing, at least in my experience. There are stories in my bones, but I don't know what they are. The stories that I had grown up believing were shaping my very being were not my stories. 

Some people I've talked with disapprove of me even getting my DNA done. They see it as me going looking for a secret that my mother clearly didn't want me to know. But does one person's wish to keep a secret outweigh another person's right to know who they are at their biological foundation? Not in my opinion. 

Too late now for such reflections anyway. Easily accessible DNA tests will be tossing many cats out of the bag from this point on. Mothers, if you have secrets, tell them now, so your children can start sooner to learn about who they are at their genetic core, and how it all turned out this way. (Oh, the fantasies I've had about Mom still being alive and the questions I'd ask...)

I'm just beginning to get to know the people who share my paternal DNA. Maybe one day I will call them family, but right now they are strangers - and in some cases, very wary ones. 

I'm hungry for the smallest of stories about the man I've only seen in a 1949 photo, but I'm working on trying to bide my time, not to scare them off with a thousand questions.

I get their suspicion. When a random woman calls from nowhere to declare herself your surprise half-sister, how can you not be weirded out and wary? Why should you suddenly answer all her deeply personal questions about this man that maybe you, too, have a lot of unanswered questions about? 

What's the protocol for approaching a "new" relative after a DNA test? I felt like a bit of a stalker for a while there, googling names on Facebook and writing messages to strangers who I thought might be a relative, or able to lead me to one. 

That tactic scared off at least one relative, who felt I was breaching their privacy. But some of them inched forward to take a closer look, and some of them have been very welcoming. We're talking on the phone now, and making plans to meet in person. 

They bring me stories, and I bring them news of their ancestors found in my prowls through paid databases: the mysterious grandmother who disappeared and then died in an asylum; the aunt who tried to cross the US border with a felon she'd met in a classified ad; the lawsuit that Uncle Joe brought against the government. We don't even know each other, yet these are our shared stories.

I'd done a DNA test in 2018 with a different company, but there was no one in my matches closely related enough to trigger any suspicion on my part. That test also didn't break down UK heritage by country, so all I saw was that I was 50 per cent UK, as expected.

Things went differently for my second test. For one thing, this time the UK heritage was parcelled by country and I turned out to be Irish, not Scottish, on my paternal side. That got my attention.

I also wasn't a match for my other cousins in the database on my dad's side. And then there was the matter of a first cousin in Toronto, with a name I'd never heard of even though I know ALL my first cousins. 

And away things went from there. Now, after a lifetime of believing that I had no biological siblings, I'm booking flights to go see my half-sister. 

I think my mom would like knowing that. I think we probably would have had a good laugh about this once we got through that first awkward conversation. I wish she was alive for me to tell her that none of this changes a thing about how I felt about her or my dad. 

***

Click for the article on my DNA discovery that ran on CTV National. Long story as to how I ended up going quite so public, but I had thought I was one anecdote in a much larger story of "people like me," only to realize later I was THE anecdote.