By Jodi Girard On September 28, 2018, at 3 p.m., I opened an email from Ancestry.com notifying me that my DNA results were ready. When I clicked on the ethnicity tab, I saw 52% England/Northwestern Europe and 46% West Coast of Africa. “That’s odd. How can that be?” I thought to myself. I know what my dad looks like, I know what my mom looks like. I called one of my best friends who had taken an ancestry test to see if she could help me understand what I was looking at. I went to her house and showed her my results and she got very quiet. “How are you feeling?” she asked. “About what?” “You’re half black.” I had seen the results on the screen with my own two eyes, but it wasn’t until my friend said the words out loud, “you’re half black” that it really hit me. I sat in stunned silence. This can’t be. Someone would have told me. My parents would never have hidden something this important. I couldn’t think, scenes from my entire life were swirling through my mind. Who else knew? I replayed every family event, every conversation, every look. I felt like someone was choking the very life out of me, pulling me apart. I didn’t know what to do next. While my story is unique in several significant ways, it also mirrors the experiences of many others who have encountered a misattributed paternity surprise. This is often referred to by acronyms such as NPE (non-paternal event) or MPE (misattributed parentage experience). Whatever the label, the outcome is the same: we believed we knew our biological parent(s), we took a DNA test, and then learned that a fundamental truth about our lives was false. The shock of receiving unexpected DNA results can be overwhelming. It disrupts your sense of self and everything you thought you knew about your identity. For me, despite the stark physical differences between me and my two white parents, I was flooded with a whirlwind of emotions—confusion, disbelief, curiosity, anger, bitterness, and even a sense of loss for the identity I had always believed was mine. This journey of self-discovery has fundamentally reshaped how I see myself and where I come from, leading to a profound shift in my understanding of who I am. Even the most grounded and rational individuals can find themselves searching for clarity in the midst of the chaos. Many people channel their anger, hurt, and confusion into helping others through podcasts, blogs, books, conferences, and Facebook support groups. It was at a conference that I first encountered, Richard Wenzel, a writer and speaker about the NPE/MPE experience, who posed some difficult yet pivotal questions to me. Click on image to read more.

By Kathleen Kirstein I thought the writing prompt “There Was A Secret” sounded good when I first heard it. I could easily imagine writing about it. However, I’ve changed my mind as I sit here around 4 pm, finally drinking my morning coffee.     When I first woke up this morning, I started writing this piece in my head, as that’s my process. The more I wrote, the angrier I got. The anger may have been smoldering in the deep abyss of every brain cell since last night. I think I was triggered by something in the adoption community, reminding me I don’t fit in.     Sometimes it’s tough being the late discovery in a sea of people who’ve always known they were adopted. I can’t relate to the life experience of always knowing. I can barely relate to being adopted because my brain still wants to toss that little fact aside. No, that never happened because if it did, my inner critic would tell me, “Your first 49 years were wrong.”  The years before a free trip to Mexico and the need for a passport outed my adoption. This led me to search for the answer to why my birth certificate was filed 14 months after my birth. The answer was I was adopted at 43 days old from a maternity home in Vermont to a family in New Hampshire.    I want to throw up because I didn’t even know my kids were the first biological family to me, the first people I met with my DNA. Somehow, that makes me feel unworthy and not to be trusted with anything because I couldn’t be trusted with my own true story. I was simply not someone important enough to know the secret.    I realized in my late teens that my body type and problem-solving skills differed significantly from those of the family who raised me. I know now I was invalidated when I asked all the adults in my family the dreaded question, “Was I adopted?” I took on the “you’re crazy” response and made it my truth, as no other truth from the adults in my world was forthcoming to change the narrative. Again, I am not worthy of honest and truthful information. A secret must remain a secret at all costs.     I pay the costs daily in various ways. It might be a trauma response here and there. It might be in the form of a non-adoptive friend at Mahjong talking about how great adoption is and how it’s a great gift. I stay silent as I have learned the price I pay when I try to educate these individuals on another point of view. My words of education only lead to my getting a backlash of all the ways I am wrong. “You didn’t have to grow up in an orphanage.” They have no clue that my first 43 days of life were spent in that orphanage they speak about. If I push the issue, I will leave the game feeling inadequate and unimportant, and my feelings of worthlessness reinforced once again because they can’t hear the truth of this adoptee’s life experience.   Click on image to read more.

Gina Cameron was always aware that something in her family wasn’t quite right. Her relationship with her father was volatile—strained and lacking in warmth and closeness. Her mother was critical, controlling, and went to great lengths to point out the ways in which the mother and daughter were different. But Cameron had no idea that for 63 years her mother had been keeping a profoundly disturbing secret. It wasn’t until Cameron was in her sixties and her mother had died that the secret tumbled out. At a family reunion, her cousin Dan inadvertently dropped a truth bomb in a casual conversation, commenting that Cameron and her sister had different fathers. Her family had always been aware, he said, and had been told not to tell her, but he was certain that by that time she’d have known. She was blindsided by this revelation that, in turn, triggered a childhood memory: an aunt saying, “Louie isn’t Genie’s father.” When she later confronted her mother about what she’d overheard, her mother not only insisted it wasn’t true, she also accused her of being ungrateful, shameful, impertinent. She was ignored for days by her parents and stuffed this experience deep down, only to have it resurface five decades later. Rattled by her conversation with Dan, Cameron arranged a meeting with her father’s niece Ellen, and got a lead for another piece of the puzzle of her origins while strolling together on the High Line in New York. Ellen called her sister Karen, who in turn phoned Cameron and recalled that they two had met when Cameron was three years old—when Louie had met her mother. And again, a memory arose from deep within her—from the time her father, in a letter, disowned her when she was 42 years old. “You’ve been a thorn in my side since you were three years old,” he wrote. She was sick, he’d said, selfish, hurtful. Looking back after all those years, it all began to make sense. “Scenes from my past crowded my waking hours,” she writes. “The revelation about my paternity was a new frame for the puzzling, troubled undercurrents I’d always felt in my childhood home. For that, I was grateful.” Grateful for a reason why she’d been seen as the family’s problem, why she’d been branded bad, a compulsive liar, a stubborn and willful child, why she’d been locked in a closet as a punishment as a child, locked in her room when her parents went out, and locked in a hotel room during a family vacation. That gratitude found expression when, at a family visit, her cousin, Carol, asked if Cameron had felt that she’d been treated differently as a child—something she and other relatives had clearly observed. When Cameron acknowledged those feelings, Carol took her hand and said, “Now you know you weren’t crazy to feel that.” “I bathed in her words and gesture—a simple acknowledgement of my perceptions, believed as fact, no judgment. Seen, and accepted, I felt more and more at home.” The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to take shape, but there was no one involved who was still alive and could confirm all the details of what had happened or answer a burning question: Who was her father? Click on image to read more.

For many of us, DNA test results have delivered news that’s made nothing in our world seem normal. Our families may not be our families. The truths we’ve known may not be truths at all. We’ve been upside-down, turned around, and left looking for some kind of foothold—a way to ground ourselves in this new unreality. Then came a virus and a quarantine that have made everyone’s lives anything but normal. On top of that, an unprecedented political climate along with civil unrest have been both globally and personally destabilizing. If that weren’t enough, bring on the holidays, which for some in the best of times are difficult, stressful, and grief-inducing. But this year, even those who typically find the season joyful may experience sadness, disappointment, and grief. If you experience anxiety, it’s likely been magnified in (or by) 2020. If you’ve experienced trauma, the fear and isolation caused by the pandemic may be retraumatizing. If you’ve been alone in quarantine or can’t spend the holidays with the people you love, your loneliness may seem overwhelming. Even if you’ve been holding your own, the common sorrow—the empathy and compassion fatigue for all who are struggling—may be depleting you. This state of life as we know it now may be getting on your last nerve.