By Deborah DillsIt’s been 6 years since I got the news over the phone late one night from my brother David. He told me to sit down because he had something shocking to tell me. I thought it was about our dad, Abe, who was in the hospital due to severe dementia and a fall two weeks earlier, but David said it was something else. He’d been cleaning Abe’s New York apartment and found a metal box with a lock on it. When he opened it, he found documents pertaining to my European adoption—an adoption I never knew had happened.

Stunned and blindsided, he read from the documents. I’d been born in Baumholder, Germany to a Jewish woman from Strasbourg, France and was adopted at 3 months old. Half of my adoption documents were in German and half in French with English translations.

I’d always known I’d been born in Germany because the woman I now know to be my adoptive mother, Norma, told me she and Abe, who was a Jewish chaplain in Chateauroux, France, had been sightseeing in Germany when she had me. Now I know the truth was that they went to Germany from France to adopt me.

In the courts in France, Norma and Abe changed my birth name, Darlene Barbara, to Deborah Susan, or Devorah Shoshana in Hebrew—a name they deemed more appropriate for a Jewish girl and the daughter of a reform rabbi.
After learning about this, I began a search to find out all I could about my birthmother and took two DNA tests. I had a close match to a woman named Jeanette who happened to be a Jewish genealogist by profession and who said she’d do all she could to help me learn about my mother, Jenny Helene Levy. Jeanette had a friend in Belgium who spoke French, and she obtained my mother’s birth certificate in Strasbourg. It revealed that she’d been born in 1921 to Samuel Levy and Hedwig Jülich Levy, so I was able to know what my grandparents’ names were.

I also discovered that Jenny came into the US in 1958, but left in 1988 to emigrate to Israel. Through another DNA test I found another cousin in Paris who in turn found a relative in Israel who took care of my mother during her later years. They sent me a memoir she’d written late in life that told the story of having fled Nazi-occupied Europe on foot, walking with a guide across the Pyrenees Mountains from France to Spain with only a paper bag containing a banana and her underwear. She remained in Spain until the end of the war. Her father, Samuel, died of a heart attack in 1942, possibly due to having lost his shipping business in Strasbourg to the Nazi laws against Jews. Her mother, Hedwig, went into hiding. Around 1959, she joined her sister in the United States and later returned to Nancy, France and died there in 1973.

I learned that most of my Jewish birth family escaped Nazi Germany, but seven who did not perished in concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Chelmno, and Theresiendstadt.

I also found a first cousin with Jeanette’s help, the son of Jenny Levy’s brother—my uncle Joseph—who was born in Strasbourg in 1913. He told me his father had been a spy in the French military during the war, and after his escape to the US with his wife, Ginette, he changed his name so he could return to France and not be arrested for having abandoned his post. My cousin told me Jenny told his parents, who lived in the US, that she gave birth to a baby girl in Baumholder in 1957, but that that baby—me—had died of a disease. Other family members in Europe were told that I had died in a hot car.

My birthfather had not been listed on my birth certificate or my adoption papers. I turned to the Facebook group DNA Detectives for assistance, and a search angel helped me discover that my birthfather was an American GI. And that same day I found out I had a biological sister, Charlene, born after me in the US, but adopted by our birthfather’s sister and husband. Sadly, she died in 1989, so I was never able to reunite with her. I did, however, discover that I had a half sister who lives in Virginia, and we speak often.

To learn all this at age 57 rocked my world. The tragedy is that I never got to meet either of my birthparents or my sister, so my heart is broken in half. By the time I learned this, both my biological parents were deceased. The pain of this more than 50-year old secret remains with me today—not only the pain caused by my adoptive parents not telling me, but also from finding out all their relatives knew I had been adopted. Looking back, I see I didn’t fit it to their family. I didn’t get along with my adoptive mother and I continually ran away when I was a teenager, finally for good in 1979, when I joined the Navy to get away from her constant abuse. I ask myself every day, why? Why didn’t my parents tell me I was adopted? What were they afraid of? I often cry buckets of tears over the pain of my secret adoption story and feel so cheated at not knowing my birth relatives growing up. But I continue my search daily to find out more about my birth family which, at times, makes me smile.Deborah Dills lives in Humble, Texas with her two sons, Aaron and Brian; a dog named Stanley; and a Tuxedo cat named Roman. She served in the Navy on active duty from 1979 until 1991 and in the Naval Reserves. She spent time living in Israel on Kibbutz Ruhama in the Negev. She loves gardening, cooking, and decorating; works on genealogy research every day; and is overjoyed to have found relatives living in many countries beyond the US, including France, Germany, Switzerland, and Peru. Find her on Facebook.BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.

Jeff award-winning actress and musician Cory Goodrich has released her first memoir, Folksong: A Ballad of Death, Discovery, and DNA, published by Finn-Phyllis Press. Folksong is at once a remarkable memoir of love and longing, an emotional ballad of grief and forgiveness, an ode to self-discovery, and a heart-stirring look at the lengths to which a family will go to protect themselves and each other.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

Are we better off forgetting the details?

I started writing this memoir as a way to process my mother’s death and remember the events surrounding it as they happened before coping mechanisms settled in to destroy the memories in order to protect me. But I haven’t yet been able to write about the actual moment of her death. I’ve been avoiding it. I’ve been avoiding reliving those moments because writing them down will make them real again in my mind and bring me one step closer to a breakdown.

My mother went out of this world like she came in. “The Red Menace,” as she was called by someone along the way—probably my father, made her own choice as to when to go. There was no peaceful exit, even though we were there, holding her hands and singing to her. A timebomb went off and simultaneously destroyed her body and my life. Perhaps that sounds dramatic, but I was simply not prepared for the devastation left in her wake or for the PTSD I experienced, like a soldier having returned from war.

I’ll be honest: I was a little worried about my mental health in the months after she died. I was able to cope better when I was with my brothers and sister. Maybe something about being together again reminded me that, in spite of the years apart and the distance between us, we are still a family. We grew up together and got on each other’s nerves as children (and still do now as adults). When we are together, I remember I am not just an interloper to their happy little trio. Nothing has changed.

But when home alone, or even at home with David and the girls, I still get a little paranoid. Obsessive. Worried that I don’t belong to this family, and that there was a plot to keep the truth from me. To punish me.

I know this is not true, but my brain goes there.

I talk out loud to myself when I am alone making coffee.

I argue with myself. I start to doubt the information I’ve been given from various people, and I make up wild conspiracy theories in my head. I feel just a small crack emerge in my sanity, and I worry that another hit will blow that motherfucker wide open and I will fall down the chasm of insanity like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Down, down, down, down…

1989, Lancaster, Pennsylvania

I’m twenty-one and I’m doing a national children’s theatre tour of Alice in Wonderland. We are performing at the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster. For some reason, we have a couple of free days after this performance, before our little bus-and-truck production moves on to the next city. Lancaster is only an hour’s drive from Wilmington, so I’ve asked my father, Tom, to come pick me up so we can spend a few days together before my cross-country tour resumes. I arrange for a ticket to be held at the box office under his name, and I tell him I will meet him out front after the show.

I am excited because Daddy has never seen me perform; he saw none of my high school choir concerts or musicals or college plays or cabarets. Nothing. I have only seen him in his world—in Delaware. He has never seen me in mine. I am thrilled that he will not only finally see me perform but he will watch me play Alice, the title character in a really charming musical for young audiences.

I’m nervous during the performance, knowing he is there in the audience, but inside I am beaming. My father is finally seeing me, the authentic me. Not the little girl but a woman, a paid performer. I AM pretty enough to be an actress.

I walk outside of the theatre after the performance, and I see Daddy standing by the box office window. I wonder, as I do every year when I see him again, if I should hug him. I run to him and pause awkwardly, and he says hello. I don’t hug him even though I want to. I wait for him to say something about my performance, and when he doesn’t, I self-consciously ask how he liked the show. “Oh, I didn’t see it. I waited out here.”

It would be cliché to say, “time stopped” or “my heart sank into my stomach,” but those things happened. The moment took my breath away—also cliché, but so true. All those years I spent growing up five-hundred miles away from him in Michigan, all the missed high school concerts, the leads in school plays, the chorus solos—these were the things that defined me. And here was the one chance he had to see—in person—the person I was and the life I had chosen, and he didn’t walk into the building. He was there, but he waited outside.

Sometimes, the things that most define our lives are not the things that happen, but the things that don’t.

Daddy died a year later, so there was never another opportunity, and even if there had been, I doubt he would have walked into the building then either. It plagues me. Did he not understand how important performing was to me? Did he just not care? Was this the ultimate metaphor for my life? My father never saw me perform. My father never saw me. My father never knew me.

And I never knew my father.

“There are things you don’t know about your father, Cory.”

And this is why I worry that another blow to the tiny but delicate crack in my sanity will shatter me wide open.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

PRETTY LIES

October 5, 2017—One day post surgery

I spend all day at the hospital with Jim. Mama drifts in and out of consciousness, but she has been down deep most of the day. She wakes periodically and claws at the tube, but the breathing machine is still doing 95% of the work, pushing air in and out of her lungs. We are frustrated and heartsick, but the nurses and doctors keep repeating flatly that she is not processing the anesthesia in a normal fashion (duh), but it is nothing to worry about—everyone responds differently. I ask what they are giving her for her pain, and they say Tylenol and I lose my shit again. Tylenol doesn’t even begin to alleviate one of my headaches, how could it possibly work on a body cleaved in two? They refuse to give her anything stronger despite my pleas, and I wonder if they think the sheer pain will rouse her from her coma.

At around seven, Jim leaves the hospital to go pick up my sister Susie from the airport. He will take her back to the house in Green Valley, and I will sit vigil with my mother until I am too weary to take any more. I am curled up in the hard chair, playing music for her, trying to focus on my work as producer of a Christmas CD for the charity organization Season of Concern. Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men is about the furthest thing from my mind right now, so I get very little done. I crack open The House at Riverton and read the first page for the third time, but I cannot focus, so back into my bag it goes. I hold my mother’s hand and self-consciously talk to her. Can she hear me? What do I have to say, anyway? Will sappy declarations of love mean anything, or will she wonder who the hell this emotional basket-case child is? But I talk anyway and sing softly to her, feeling foolish but determined to let her know that I am there.

Mark, the day nurse, is in and out of the tiny ICU room, and he smiles and gives me encouragement, but I can see he is frustrated looking at the numbers on my mother’s chart. He has been adjusting levels of various medications throughout the course of the day, but nothing seems to satisfy him. I’ve asked him several times if my mother’s condition is something he’s seen before, and each time he shrugs and says, “I’ve seen it all.” But now that Jim is out of the room, his answer changes. He wants me to know the truth because he knows I know he has been lying.

Mark is short and sturdy; a comfortable man. I’ve also learned he is a musician, so I instinctively trust him. He is the type of man you could lean on, so I do. “Mark, is this normal?” I ask again.

He sighs and sits down in the chair next to me. He takes my hand. “No. It’s not. She is down so deep, and if she doesn’t start breathing on her own soon, you are going to have to make some difficult choices.”

“She doesn’t want this,” I tell him, shaking my head furiously. I can feel her not coming up for air, not breathing on her own because she wants to die, but you can’t exactly pull the plug on an intuition.

“Are there any other options? Is there anything else we can do?”

“Dialysis,” Mark tells me, “but we really don’t want to put her through that. It’s extreme.” He takes my other hand and looks me straight in the eyes. “So, we are going to do everything we can to get her out of this before we go that route.”

Okay…Dialysis—not a good sign.

I thank Mark for his forthrightness and his sympathy. He gives me courage by telling me the truth.

Here’s the thing about the truth: It is usually easier to handle than a lie. When you tell a lie, the person you are telling it to usually knows, somewhere inside. They may not consciously realize it, but an uneasy feeling sets in. They start to doubt themselves and their instincts, and they know something is wrong, even if they can’t quite put a finger on what that something is.

It works that way for me, anyway. I can deal with a hard truth. A pretty lie, on the other hand, is like walking in quicksand, every step pulling me further down and under, just like my mother is down and under in her postoperative coma.

Tell me the truth so I am not basing my life on a lie: Have you guessed my mother’s secret yet?Cory Goodrich came to Chicago to pursue her dream of acting in 1989. Born in Wilmington, Delaware and raised in Clarkston, Michigan, she’s a Jeff Award-winning best actress for her roles as Mother in Drury Lane Oakbrook’s acclaimed production of Ragtime and as June Carter Cash in the Johnny Cash revue Ring of Fire at Mercury Theater Chicago. A five-time Jeff nominee, Goodrich has performed in productions at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, Chicago Shakespeare, Theatre at the Center, Ravinia, Candlelight, and Drury Lane. A graduate of Michigan State University, she’s also a singer/songwriter, producer, writer, mother of two, and children’s composer with two award-winning CDs, Hush and Wiggly Toes and a recording artist with original country album W.O.M.A.N. As the recipient of the 2015 Cohen-Grappel Recording Endowment, Goodrich produced Wildwood Flower, a collection of traditional and original folk songs featuring the autoharp. Her latest experimental folk album, produced with The Quiet Regret’s Ethan Deppe, is set to drop in March and features music from her memoir. Visit her website, find her on Facebook, and on Instagram @folksongbook and @corygoodrich.

Paul Kimball, a 58-year-old successful musician and actor, has wrestled throughout his life with feelings of abandonment after having been adopted. He was born to a young interracial couple, his father an Armenian immigrant from Iraq and his mother a professional cellist from California. His father wasn’t prepared to marry, and his mother may have been fearful of scandalizing her parents—this was the early 1960s, when having a baby out of wedlock was still taboo and interracial coupling still stigmatized—and they planned to abort the baby. It’s not clear what led to a change of heart, but they soon split up, and his mother relinquished Paul when he was one-week-old. He lived in foster care for the next four and a half months, and on his first birthday he was adopted by a loving couple.

To examine and give voice to his feelings, he’s written a memoir, We Are All Human Beings: An Adoptee Ponders. It’s an especially apt title because, like many adoptees, Kimball has more questions than answers. He explores the joys, heartbreaks, and complications of reuniting with his birth parents and grapples with the emotional consequences.

Here, he offers an excerpt, Chapter 12, which not only describes his initial connection with his birthmother, Wendy. It also expresses his passion for the cello, as evidenced by a tribute to the renowned cellist Jacqueline Du Pre. He wrote the tribute to Du Pre many years before he’d learned about his birthmother and before he’d discovered she, too, played the cello.

—BKJ

Excerpt from We Are All Human Beings

By Paul Kimball

For about a week I called the two numbers. As I recall, the New York number had a strange answering machine message. The L.A. number would just ring without any response. Try to imagine what this feels like. If she answers, I am going to speak with my birth mother for the first time. Perhaps this isn’t her, just a coincidence. I don’t know what to expect. I am so frightened. Once she answers there is no turning back. Both of our lives are changed in an instant. She has no idea that I am trying to contact her. I planned out my opening remarks carefully.

And then she answered.

It was the L.A. number. The one that kept ringing. This is how I remember the phone call. Luckily, I wrote this in my journal back in 2000.

Birthmother Wendy: “Hello.”

Me: “Hello. My name is Paul Kimball and I am with musicians local 189 in Stockton, California. I am looking for a professional cellist named Wendy Brennan.” With this information, she could hang up on me but always be able to find me.

Wendy: This is she. Later she told me that she thought that she was being asked to play chamber music.

Pause, pause, pause.

Me: “I don’t quite know how to say this but does the name Frank Novak mean anything to you?”

Pause.

Wendy: “It might.” It might? Does this mean that she knows who I am?

I don’t remember the next exchange.

Wendy: “Are you of Armenian descent?” She knows who I am, and I know who she is. No one but my birth mother would ask that question out of the blue.

Me: “Yes I am half Armenian.”

Wendy: “Oh my God. Where were you born?”

Me: “In Fort Bragg California, November of 1962. I think we both know who we are.”

We talked on the phone for three hours.

It was so friendly. I was ecstatic! I have never felt so complete in my entire life. A hole had been filled. I had a new friend. If that is how you describe being reunited! We were both classical musicians. We both played in orchestras. We were both nice and friendly. I had a birth sister who did not know of me. I was married with two daughters. She had performed in Carnegie Recital Hall as a soloist to good reviews. She had lived with Nadia Boulanger, the esteemed teacher of composers and studied cello with Paul Tortelier, the great cellist. She had been in the American Symphony under Leopold Stokowski and played in Broadway Pit Orchestras. I conduct orchestra pits for musicals. She had a New York accent. She split her time between L.A. and New York. I loved this woman. “The capacity for love had expanded.” She had a 31-year-old daughter who attended Juilliard as a child flute player and was involved as an actress in T.V., movies, and commercials. I act in plays and was even in a dopey local T.V. commercial in Stockton that aired constantly. People still talk about it on occasion.

We decided to meet as soon as possible. We had thought of a halfway point, but I wanted to drive down to her apartment in L.A.

I was teaching elementary music at T.C.K. at the time. I updated my fellow teachers on the story. I will always love them for their compassion.

The night before I left, I visited my adopted parents, Lorna and Bob. I held their hands and told them that I loved them. I didn’t want to hurt them, but I had to do this. They assured me that it was okay. Mom said that she didn’t feel threatened. From my journal in 2000. “I love them so much! They are my best friends. I tell them everything. I never want to lose them, and I get scared I might. I also don’t want to lose Wendy and Raya (birth sister). Both families are very important to me as are the Mullers (In-laws). I need all of them. I love Jeanette, Seth and Amy. I love Dominee, Alyssa and Ashley. These are my family members and I love them.”

It was time to drive to L.A. That week I had been only getting about 4 hours of sleep a night. The evening before the drive I went to bed at 11:45 p.m. and woke up at 3:30 a.m. I copied down my story of Scream as well as a tribute to Jacqueline Du Pre that I had put in my journal in 1987. This was 13 years before meeting Wendy. When I wrote this, Jacqueline Du Pre had just passed away. I had no clue that my birth mother was a cellist.

The following was written 32 years earlier.

Reflections on Jacqueline Du Pre – October 23^rd, 1987

Jackie died on October 19^th of the ill fated disease, Multiple Sclerosis. She was 43, I believe. She has been and probably always will be my favorite musician, the one that I listen to more than anyone else. I consider her one of my teachers even though we never met.

I first heard of her when some fellow Berkeley High students were talking. They had seen and heard Schubert’s Trout Quintet on PBS. Jacky, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman, Daniel Barenboim and Zubin Mehta were the players! Later when Rebecca (Strauss) and I were in the Berkeley Public Library we came across a Du Pre record and Becca said: “Paul. Check this out. I’ve never heard the record but you will love Du Pre.” When we listened to it I felt almost sick with emotion. I was struck by the absolute sincerity of her playing. She expressed so much that there was simply no way to miss it. Her tone is golden. It is her pure soul with nothing to disturb it. Every time I hear her, I am inspired, embarrassed by my own inhibitions in music, bewildered, determined, determined to not miss the wonders of life as I pass through it. Her second recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto is one of the greatest musical accomplishments. In some of my most emotional moments I have often felt them by reliving her performance of this piece. The opening theme after the great introduction represents so much painful longing. It reaches into space, searching, searching for something. To me it is so lonely. Perhaps I relate this to the loneliness I felt in college. I often remember going for long walks and thinking about this theme with her yearning tone and feeling sad, yet expressing the sadness, not just holding it in. Lorna would be proud!

In my own playing I hear her traits. Trying to achieve a personal tone, letting the wonderful stresses in phrases come alive, but most of all, trying to be absolutely free and deeply sincere in expression.

Thank you Jackie. I love you and am grateful for your greatness. May you rest in peace having lived a difficult but important life.

Little did I know that in a way, I was paying tribute to my lost birth mother; my original musician, cellist. I felt sick with emotion listening to Jacqueline Du Pre but didn’t know the full reason. How could I? I was remembering Wendy’s playing from before I was born.Paul Kimball is an active musician, choir teacher, French hornist, and actor in Stockton, California. As a baby, he lived in foster care and was eventually adopted by a liberal Berkeley family in the 1960s. He is married to Dr. Dominee Muller-Kimball. They have two daughters, Ashley and Alyssa. Look for his book here. BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.

Searching for Mom, an award-winning memoir by Sara Easterly, pulls back the veil on adoption, revealing its harsher side—the primal wound that leaves a child desperate to feel worthy, to belong, to be good enough. Easterly was adopted at two days old, born to an adolescent girl coerced to relinquish her in a “grey-market” adoption. She had difficulty attaching to her adoptive mother and struggled with feelings of abandonment by her birthmother, which spurred an impossible quest for perfection, a crisis of faith and trust, and a battle with overwhelming emotions. She felt broken and cast off, unwanted. To protect her adoptive mother’s feelings, she suppressed her deep longing for and curiosity about her birthmother, putting her own needs and desires last to keep a peace, until finally, when she was nearly 40, she admitted her desire to search. Her adoptive mother reacted with a cocktail of emotions including fear, anger, and defensiveness. And then everything changed, when she revealed that in fact Sara had been wanted by her birth mother, causing Sara to reevaluate everything she’d come to believe. In Searching for Mom, Easterly traces her search for, and reunion with, her birthmother, the strain it placed on her relationship with her adoptive mother, and the complicated bond she shared with both women. More than a search tale, it’s a story about love, faith, and spiritual transformation. Here, the author shares an excerpt from her compelling memoir—its first chapter.

—BKJ

Taking Flight

We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves.

—Romans 15:1 (ESV)

Monday morning. I’d flown home to Seattle, back from Denver long enough to toss dirty clothes out of their suitcases and start a load of laundry. While my two daughters reacquainted with their dolls and Magna-Tiles, I recalled my mom’s response when I’d told her that I planned to return to Denver for another visit the following week.

“Oh. I’m not sure I’ll still be here then, Sara.” Mom started to say goodbye.

I cut her off.

“No. I’ll see you again.” I smiled, trying to pretend this was any other farewell. Trying to convince her—convince myself—that this wasn’t really The End. There was no way Mom was dying. I’d been fabricating this kind of confidence about her life for the last five years.

But goodbye was in Mom’s eyes. Goodbye was in her embrace, weak as it was, even though I’d grown accustomed to “air hugs”—lest I spread germs to her highly susceptible lungs and body.

Suddenly, I felt sure of nothing. I faked my way back to life-as-usual on the plane ride home, barely able to process anything my children were saying. I was Mama-on-Autopilot, dragging carseats off the plane, lugging weary bodies into the car and then inside the house, washing airplane crud off tiny hands. Not that any of this was unusual. Numbed-out mom dutifully attending to the needs of small people while furtively fixating on a swirling emotional storm was one of my specialties.

I needed to talk to someone so I called a close friend. Heather had been through this herself, when her mother died a few summers earlier.

“You’re back in Seattle?” she asked skeptically, confirming my unease.

“Yes, but I’ll go back to Denver again next week,” I said. “I told my mom I’m going to go back again next Monday.”

After an awkward pause, Heather said, “I hesitate to tell you this, but the end can go pretty fast.”

“Faster than a week?”

“I’m sure it’s different for everyone,” she said. “I just know it went really fast for my mom. I wasn’t prepared for that.”

Unsettled, I called my sister for reassurance.

“I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s been a change since you left,” Amy said.

Even though we’d been home for less than an hour, I moved full throttle, rebooking a flight back to Denver that would leave in two hours. After dropping Violet and Olive off at a friend’s house, I sped my way through childcare and scheduling plans while en route to the airport—calling my in-laws, the preschool teacher, babysitters, and my closest friends and neighbors.

For a moment, I paused from the grim matter at hand to applaud myself. As a new parent I’d learned about the importance of a support village—something often lacking in this isolating age without live-in grandparents or “aunties” next door, and thanks to a fleeing-from-church culture. Mindful of this, and in lieu of in-city grandparents and church-based community, I’d deliberately worked to surround my family with our own “village.” Look at those efforts pay off! I told myself.

All the week’s plans came together as I rounded my way into the parking garage at SeaTac airport. My husband Jeff, who’d been on a business trip, would land in Seattle within thirty minutes of my flight’s departure out of Seattle. That left just the right amount of overlap for me to hand him the car keys, tell him he’d find the car in row 5J of the parking garage, text him the week’s schedule for the kids, and kiss his stunned face on the cheek.

As an event planner by trade, I’d always been a master of logistics. But I usually spent months working on each event. This rushed effort surpassed anything I’d attempted before. Did I have help on my side? I wondered, and then caught a flit of an answer: Maybe this is the kindness God doles out when your mom is dying. In any case, the fact that everything lined up so effortlessly and would be so gentle on my daughters, made me think that I was flying in the right direction. I just hoped I’d get there in time.

More importantly, I hoped to be up for the challenge. Mom had been preparing for her death for the last four months, but that didn’t mean I had.

Sure, I’d read Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying by Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley. I’d even bought copies for my dad, sister, aunt, and grandma. I’d read about a dying mother who kept appealing to her family with travel metaphors, but whose family didn’t grasp that her last request wasn’t literal, which created a lot of unnecessary anguish for everyone during her final days.1 As a writer and reader, looking for meaning was right in my wheelhouse. I figured I’d be equipped to decipher any metaphors Mom might employ.

I’d also found out that dying people often converse with someone significant from their past who has already died, and how upsetting it can be for them if they aren’t believed. According to Callanan and Kelley, family members are the most qualified to figure out any of the hidden messages that could come from one of these conversations.2

When I was in my twenties, my deceased grandfather visited me during a dream while I slept on the pull-out sofa at my grandma’s place. It was a comforting dream, but the intensity of it began to pull me from sleep. My adored Papa was right there, I knew, and I fervently wanted to see him again. As my eyes slowly opened, I watched Papa’s translucent shape, lying right next to mine, evaporate. The mystical moment, too, dissipated. For the next two days I pondered talking to Mom about it. I wanted her to help me understand this encounter I’d had with her father, but she was a self-described “fundamentalist Christian,” and I figured she’d judge my spiritual experience as “New Age nonsense.” When I finally worked up my courage and recounted the story, though, Mom urged me to call Grandma.

“She’s been waiting for a sign from Papa,” she said, “She’ll want to know he’s at peace.”

Mom had helped me decipher Papa’s hidden message, and I, in turn, planned to help her. Maybe there’s more mystery around death and dying than we realize. I planned to be open to it, anyway. As Callanan and Kelley had said, “We can best respond to people who experience the presence of someone not alive by expecting it to happen.”3

Expectant or not, this was mostly practical book learning—savory knowledge that fed my brain and my propensity as an adoptee to believe in far-fetched stories. My emaciated heart, meanwhile, beat with a hankering for more.

Because my heart knew that I’d been afraid to face the reality of Mom’s declining health. I’d been too scared to speak important things that needed saying. I passed over vulnerable opportunities with jokes, denial, indifference, feigned confidence, forced control. I’d locked my feelings in a thick protective casing so I wouldn’t have to deal with whatever I was supposed to feel when I thought about the rest of my life without my mom—while wrestling with memories of our last two tumultuous years.

Deep down, did I ever even accept her as my mother? I would miss her for sure. Perhaps more for my daughters, only four and five, who wouldn’t get a chance to truly know her. But would it profoundly affect me when she was gone?

I felt so detached as I stared at the grey clouds outside the airplane window. But I’d vowed to give Mom myfinal gift: the peaceful death she deserved, the death a Good Adoptee⁴ owed her, the death I felt I needed to give her to prove my appreciation and loyalty.

I reached under the seat for my laptop and began compiling family photos for her memorial slideshow. I planned to leverage my event-planning skills to pull together the funeral she never would have dared to dream up.

Turbulence began to agitate the plane—the tell-tale sign that the Rocky Mountains were behind us as we approached Denver. I gripped the arm rests of my seat as the plane jerked in the sky.

Pushing away my feelings to give Mom what she needed was my training ground for becoming a parent. Ignoring my needs helped me get the job done: Making dinner when I’d rather be lounging on the couch devouring a good book … setting aside my own upsets or fears in order to soothe equally intense ones for my girls … hiding my true feelings in the face of hopes and disappointments. This all served me as a mother, didn’t it?

When I dared to look at the truth, I knew it served me as a daughter, too. It’s how I’d learned to stay safe, keep Mom close. Dutifully choosing her needs over mine ensured that she’d never leave me. Surely that’s where everything went so wrong, where I’d messed it all up, with my first mother.

Only Mom was about to leave me, too.

Images of being severed from her approached as fast as the plane slammed onto the tarmac. I thought about the pictures I’d just looked at—Mom’s glowing face, delighting in me, proud of me. Would I ever exude that much love for my daughters, the way Mom overflowed with it for us? Could I be as present as she always seemed to be?

Remember her manipulation and lies, though, I reminded myself. Her jealousy. Her mean streak. The last two years of mother-daughter turmoil because I broke the silence, stopped pretending … Those all told a different story.

A story I didn’t want to end this way.

A story I didn’t want to end at all.

I didn’t want Mom to die, and I definitely didn’t want our “us” to conclude before I could find the words my heart longed to say. I wanted to grow, become the person I yearned to be. A daughter—and a mother—who didn’t act out of obligation, a girl whose heart wasn’t unflappable, a human who dared to feel.

If only it were that easy.

© 2019 by Sara Easterly. All rights reserved.Sara Easterly is an adoptee and award-winning author of books and essays. Her memoir, Searching for Mom, won a Gold Medal in the Illumination Book Awards, among many other honors. Her essays and articles have been published by Psychology Today, Dear Adoption, Red Letter Christians, Feminine Collective, Her View From Home, Godspace, and others. Find her online at saraeasterly.com, on Facebook, on Instagram @saraeasterlyauthor, and on Twitter @saraeasterly.

Read her essay on Severance here.

Award-winning journalist Mary Beth Sammons has collected the accounts of people who’ve explored their ancestry, whether through family history, genealogical research, ancestry travel, or DNA testing, and she’s discovered a common denominator among the ancestor seekers. Overwhelmingly, the storytellers find in the discovery and sharing of their stories an experience of healing, a greater sense of wholeness, and a broader understanding of the threads that run through all humanity.

In Ancestry Quest: How Stories from the Past Can Heal the Future, Sammons takes as her subject the growing phenomenon of DNA testing and the passion for genealogical research. She describes the journeys of seekers tracing their bloodlines—their quests to solve known family mysteries, to grapple with unexpected revelations, or to look for knowledge with which to better understand their health. For many of these seekers, she writes, “this process has recast entire lives with surprises including shocking lineages, long-lost siblings, and family secrets that might have been buried for decades. For many, it has opened questions about heritage, ethnicity, race, culture, and privacy.” And for others, she demonstrates, it validates both vague intuition and long-held suspicions.

Among the story tellers are those who’ve made incidental and accidental discoveries and those who deliberately traced family connections in an effort to solve known puzzles or satisfy a nagging suspicion. Sammons discovered that for most, no matter how shocking the discoveries may have been, individuals move past surprise and even trauma to recognize transformative life lessons.

Excavating the past, Sammons reveals, not only helps people to reconstruct their own family stories, but also to redefine the nature of family and open a new window on the political, historical, and cultural environments that formed our ancestors’—and thus our own—identities.

Throughout, Sammons tells the stories of people who find answers to the questions “’Who am I?’ and ‘Why am I who I am?’”

The answers, almost without except, point to positive, even joyful, responses. Says one of her interviewees, “I always felt like I was such an oddball, but now know the truth.” One seeker observed that having found her biological father filled gaps in her self-knowledge, while one who found a biological sister said the discovery “filled a hole I didn’t even know existed.”

Another describes the experience of unexpected relationships “freeing.” Case in point: Elizabeth Garden, author of the novel Tree of Lives, which features a character drawn to Jewish people in her community who discovers after taking a DNA test that she’s part Jewish. It’s an experience that happened in the author’s own life. After taking the test in search of a Jewish thread running through her distant ancestry, Garden said, “The result was a lot more than a thread —it was  whole new warp and weft in the family tapestry.” The discovery, Sammons writes, “brought her a sense of rootedness within a culture she’d always been drawn to without understanding why.”

There are stories about individuals who discover their older sisters are in fact their mothers, whose fathers aren’t their fathers, whose beloved cultural identities are not theirs through bloodlines, and whose research reveals a cascade of trauma through generations.

Throughout, Sammons affirms the transformative power of storytelling. “Yes,” she says, “so many family secrets are rooted in shame about issues that define our common humanity, such as infidelity, hidden sexuality, abuse, racial or religious origins, or infertility. But the best antidote is to tell our stories. By doing so, we can heal the wounds for our entire lineage—wounds that have been holding those who came before us captive for years.”

Family stories, she insists, can break the inherited cycle of trauma; foster forgiveness, acceptance, and understanding; shatter stereotypes; and lead to a reexamination of assumptions about race.

The exploration of ancestry, Sammons illustrates, is vastly more than mere hobby. It goes to the heart of our shared humanity. “Our ancestors need us to connect some dots,” Elizabeth Garden told Sammons, “and only those of us who listen to their voices can do that.”

—BKJMary Beth Sammons is an award-winning journalist and author of more than a dozen books including Living Life as a Thank You: The Transformative Power of Daily Gratitude and The Grateful Life: The Secret to Happiness, and the Science of Contentment. Her latest is Ancestry Quest: How Stories From the Past Can Heal the Future. She’s a cause-related communications consultant for numerous nonprofits and healthcare organizations including Five Keys Schools and Programs, Cristo Rey Network, Rush University Medical Center and more. She’s been the Bureau Chief for Crain’s Chicago Business, a features contributor for the Chicago Tribune, Family Circle, and Irish American News, and a daily news reporter for Daily Herald and AOL News. She lives in the suburbs of Chicago.

By Sarah Blythe ShapiroWhenever I tell this story, there’s always the same reaction: “I don’t know what to say.” And who am I to blame them? How could they? I wouldn’t either.

Sometimes, I still don’t.

I’ve always known. From my earliest waking memories, I knew I was special; I knew that he was special too. Because he was a donor, and I was a donor child, in our unusualness I had a bond with this mystery man. But I didn’t know who he was, and he didn’t know I existed.

When you’re a donor child with a single mother by choice, something can happen. There’s a certain void. An abyss. Not a crater, because that would imply something was once there. You feel empty. You feel lonely. You didn’t have a choice. In this situation, everybody but you had a choice.

Let’s backtrack. It’s April 2018, and I’m lying on my stomach, stretched out on the stone-cold floor of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, on a retreat. Only three months until my 18th birthday. We were told to take some time to write and meditate. I’d been meaning to write this letter. Now I finally have time to do it. “Dear Dad.” No, that’s not right. Wait, yes it is! “I love you!” “Please love me!” “Please…want me.” Want me, goddammit.

I never sent the letter. My 18th birthday arrived. Finally. I reached out to California Cryobank. The deal is that you get three tries to reach out; if the donor never responds, you aren’t allowed to facilitate contact ever again. And the donor has a right to his anonymity. Anonymous until 18. But he still has a right to turn you down when you turn 18. Such a bright age, 18. Shiny, almost. Full of promise and potential. Hope for the future.

I never heard back, so I figured he hadn’t received my letter or wasn’t interested, and I went off to college, determined to immerse myself and desperately trying to flee from heartbreak. And I didn’t hear back from him. Not then. But I did hear from someone just as interesting.

A half sibling. And then another half sibling. And another. And another. Every week, a new sibling posted in California Cryobank’s Donor Sibling Registry, and I reached out to them. Since I was raised an only child, to suddenly become one of 10 is mind-boggling, to say the least.

But this story is about Caveh. Caveh and Sarah. Father and daughter. He might not agree with that terminology, but after all, he is my father. No, he didn’t raise me, but everyone has two genetic parents, and he’s one of mine.

In late September 2018, I got the call. A third-party mediator informed me that he was interested in contact. For several months we went back and forth over email as Sarah and “C.” All I knew was that he was a married filmmaker with two young children and had never been contacted by donor offspring before. He wanted to maintain anonymity in case I was nuts, which was both understandable and frustrating because I know I’m not nuts. I half-expected a “welcome home” greeting and a general eagerness to know me. I kept thinking that if I was in his shoes, I would be amazed and excited to know that I had helped to produce this young adult. But he was nothing of the sort. Caveh was very uncomfortable with communication for several months and hurt my feelings by continuously distancing himself from me. He acted as if this was an organ or blood donation and not a sperm donation. As if he hadn’t realized that sperm creates children who become adults with their own minds and experiences.

But I still wanted to know him.

In all honesty, I figured out who he was before he told me. After being tipped off that he worked at a school in the Tri-State area, I naturally looked up all 96 New York City universities and colleges. Hunched over my laptop on the floor of my dorm at 3 AM and about halfway through the list, I finally found him. After confirming the ethnicity of his surname, I just knew. That’s my dad. That whole night was a blur, but I do remember calling my mother, intermittently crying and laughing hysterically.

Some of you may find this an overreaction. To you, I say: you cannot know how it feels unless you experience it yourself. If there’s one word I can use to describe my Nancy Drew-like discovery, it’s “relief.” Even though he wasn’t the person I had hoped he was, the bolded, italicized question mark of my life—Who the hell is he?—was answered with a resounding exclamation point. He’s a famous filmmaker!

A little background on Caveh: born in Washington D.C. in April 1960, Caveh Zahedi is an Iranian-American avant-garde filmmaker who prides himself on his commitment to truth, whatever it takes. In his case, truth resulted in the end of his third marriage with his compulsive need to film literally everything. But Caveh is passionate about his work and is nothing if not a risk-taker. There are a lot of people out there who love his stuff. Man, is it weird having a famous dad.

After he finally revealed his identity to me, we first met in September 2019 in Chicago at a film screening. He flew there from NYC (my birthplace, by the way) and I took an 8-hour Megabus from St. Olaf College to meet him. We had agreed that our first encounter should be filmed, to be made into a documentary. Caveh apparently has a database full of fans hoping to get the call that he needs them for his films in some capacity. So when he asked, three eager crew people showed up with equipment—working for free—and completely unaware of what they were about to film. They just hoped it would be interesting.

They weren’t disappointed.

The whole night felt surreal. We filmed for three hours; hell, we even had a drone follow us in a park as we walked side by side, “bonding.” It was pretty awkward trying to fill the time and keep up a dialogue. But I won’t talk much about that. You can see the film for yourself when it comes out. Just look for “I Was A Sperm Donor.”

The most memorable parts of the night for me happened off-camera. After our filming session, we retreated to another filmmaker’s apartment to watch the first two seasons of “The Show About The Show.” At one point in the show, Caveh recounts the filming process in “I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore.” Sharing some cashews from the vending machine, he leaned over to me, pointing, and said, “that’s your grandfather.” Both the grandparents I knew were dead. But being reminded, just for a moment, that I have more family out there, including two other grandparents, that was a blessing.

The other special moment happened after 3 AM (both Caveh and I are night owls). He walked me to my car to say goodbye. There was a lot of shuffling and twitchiness and not a whole lot of warmth. But we both noticed the chalky full moon. As he walked away, I watched his narrow, suited figure slip away, with the same moon watching over us both. I had the urge to take a picture and capture that moment, but I was afraid he would look back.

So, where are we now? Most recently, we’ve been editing “I Am A Sperm Donor” together. While watching clips of our film, I had the chance to watch myself. Hair done up in pin curls, makeup on, beaming. When Caveh opens the door and asks if he can give me a hug, I let out this little girlish giggle—so eager to please—and say, “yeah!” Willing to do just about anything for my dad. Seeing this from the outside, I am struck with a pang of grief. Grief for that little girl who missed out on all the daddy-daughter dances and first introductions of her new boyfriend and graduations with her dad standing in the audience, waving proudly. I deserved a standing dad.

You know, I had planned for this essay to also address all the reasons why donor anonymity shouldn’t exist: there is no way to prevent a donor lying on an application and there’s no limit to how often a donor can donate at many clinics. Anonymity deprives donor offspring of important medical information, such as risks for potential cancers and genetic disorders, and half-siblings run the risk of committing incest if they don’t know they’re related. The list is endless.

But somehow I realized that the primary point I want to emphasize is the relationship you lose out on when your donor is anonymous. There’s no one to whom to attribute that dark, curly head and olive skin and those almond-shaped brown eyes. And where’d you get that tiny figure with no hips? And why are you so assertive and reckless and obstinate? Certainly not from Mom’s side of the family. The closest comparison I can make is to phantom limb syndrome. You feel this burning pain where one of your legs used to be (though I suppose I was never born with that leg) and the only way to quench the pain is to hold up a mirror to your other leg to trick your mind into believing you have full function of both limbs. That’s what it’s like growing up with a single mom; especially one who tries her best to be both mom and dad. But when you find your father, it’s like you’re finally fitted with a prosthetic and you’ve been given a chance at approaching a normal life. You’ll never have two real legs, but other people might think you do and eventually you’ll start to believe you do, too.

Caveh and I don’t have a great relationship, and it’s strange and awkward and uncomfortable and not warm. But there is also a beauty in having shared this experience with him, of having met—father and daughter—for the first time. I am grateful for the circumstances, and I am very curious to see how our relationship unfolds in the coming years, but it’s not a picture-perfect story. This is really meant to describe the grief and repercussions of not having met your bio parent, and the completely earth-shattering and ambivalent emotions that occur when you find out that the person is not at all how you pictured. I couldn’t have written about how grateful I am to have met him and how happy I am to know him, since that would be a lie. And if he said that, it would be a lie too.Sarah Blythe Shapiro is a 20-year old student from Wilmette, Illinois, conceived by donor sperm and raised by a single mother by choice. She has always known she was donor conceived. Her mother used an Open ID at 18 donor, since known donors were not available at the cryobank. Since discovering that her donor is a famous filmmaker, she has found 14 half-siblings. Shapiro is a passionate advocate for the rights of donor conceived people and is hoping to encourage families and donors to prioritize the needs of their donor conceived offspring. She actively works to explore the intersectionality of donor conception as it pertains to both LGBTQ fertility rights and racial biases of cryobanks and clinics.Severance is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

On Venmo: @sarahblytheshapiroBEFORE YOU GO…

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By Brad EwellIn Facebook groups for people with not parent expected (NPEs) or misattributed parentage experiences (MPEs), there’s a consistent large difference in the ratio of men to women. If you were a man looking to meet women, this would be a place to be. There are typically a handful of men and thousands of women. Where are all the guys? Percentage-wise there couldn’t be that many more women than men having DNA surprises. So what’s going on here?

Looking at the bigger picture, this is a fairly common phenomenon among individuals with depression, anxiety, stress, and other mental health concerns. Several studies indicate that men are typically much less likely than women to seek professional help when facing psychological distress. The study authors suggest a number of factors for the disparity, such as the fear many men have of being judged as emotionally vulnerable or weak. Researchers also point to the fact that because men are trained from an early age to compete with other men, it makes them less likely to trust each other and reveal what they may perceive as weakness.

I posed the question to several individuals who not only are behavioral health practitioners but who also have personal experience with misattributed parentage. Their thoughts generally mirror the finding of the studies, but they offered additional insights.

According to Jodi Klugman-Rabb,* a licensed marriage and family therapist and licensed professional counselor, “Sometimes it’s as simple as the gender role conditioning specific to cultural norms that men are not manly if emotional. So expressing emotions is then seen as weak, making group process emasculating. On a more micro level, emotional process can have a lot to do with the family of origin dynamics and whether kids were allowed or encouraged to explore emotions safely, how cultural gender norms influenced that, and, to take it back out on a macro level, how these expectations were transmitted intergenerationally.”

Eve Sturges,* also a licensed marriage and family therapist, agrees. “Men,” she adds, “generally are taught to look for solutions; without a direct path, they often don’t understand the benefit.” Men view support groups as a place to talk about things, but they fail to see the benefit of the emotional burden that’s released when feelings are verbally expressed.

Men also fear that a vulnerable disclosure might disrupt the peace in their relationships, whether with their mates or family members or at work, according to Cotey Bowman,* a licensed professional counselor associate.

In order to make support groups more appealing to men, these professionals say, the stigma that prevents men from seeking support and expressing emotions must be addressed at a cultural level. Until this cultural change, the best option is to allow and encourage men to see other men model vulnerability and acceptance of emotions.

After reading the studies and talking to professionals, I can see myself and the culture I was raised in fairly accurately reflected in their comments. At 50 years old, I’ve been a police officer for half of my life. Police and other first respondors are notoriously emotionally restricted at work because the job demands it, explains Jodi Klugman-Rabb. It’s very difficult, she adds, “to ask first responders to compartmentalize at work but share at home. Most cannot walk both lines because our brains are not wired for that level of compartmentalization.” It’s an apt assessment of the people I work with daily.

I was raised in an environment where the expression of emotions was an indicator of weakness. As a result, I’ve grown into a person who is self-reliant to a fault. I try to avoid having people to do things for me because I don’t want to bother them or draw attention to myself. My dad taught me the importance of being self-sufficient and tough. When you get hurt, he said, you just “rub some dirt on it” and move on.

I vividly remember several instances in my childhood when my father imparted these lessons. Once, while building a fence, he accidentally nailed the palm of his hand to a picket fence with a nail gun. My job was to go to the other side of the fence, pull his hand off the nail, and get some duct tape so he could tape his hand up and finished the fence. Another time, he lost his balance while using a chain saw on a ladder and sawed through part of his thigh. Again, I was assigned to get the duct tape so he could tape himself back up and finish the job. (I think he got some stitches, but only after we finished the job). Finally, and most memorable, was the day he broke his leg. We were riding horses in a pasture when another horse came up alongside him. The horse tried to kick my dad’s horse, but instead kicked my dad in the shin. My dad grimaced. “We need to go back,” he said. “I think my leg is broke.” We rode back a couple of miles without him making a sound; he just wore that same grimace on his face. Once we got to the stalls, we tied up the horses, got in the truck, and started to the hospital. I was in middle school and had driven a few times around where we kept our horses but never out on the street. When we got to the road, my dad stopped and said, “If I feel like I’m going to pass out, I’ll just pull over to the side of the road and switch seats so you can drive me to the hospital.” He managed the 10-mile drive to the hospital, where he allowed me to grab a wheelchair to get him into the emergency room. Inside, I watched blood pour out when the nurses pulled his boot off. It turned out he had a compound fracture.

Clearly, reaching out to others for help is not something I was taught to do.

You may be wondering, then, how have I come to be writing an article about being emotionally vulnerable in groups? Given the way I was raised and the culture I grew up and work in, this is the last place in the world I’d want or expect to find myself. I don’t consider myself particularly weak or vulnerable. My job requires the opposite of me; I have to show courage and be strong for others. I had been in therapy once several years ago for help with some anxiety and stress issues, but my therapist had moved away and I felt better, so I didn’t take the time to find another one. I addressed it more as a strategy session than as therapy. I believe this is because, as Eve Sturges explains, I was looking for that step-by-step strategy to fix my problem and I didn’t view talking about my feelings as a useful part of the steps. I also told only a handful of people in my life that I had gone to therapy. This was intentional—a decision based on the fear of being emotionally vulnerable. I simply didn’t want to be viewed as weak and I believed that would happen if people knew I was struggling with my emotions.

So what went so wrong (or right) to bring me to the point that I’m sharing personal struggles and fears out in the world for other people to see? The answer is nothing. I finally realized no matter how much I wanted to believe I could deal with everything on my own, that’s not realistic. When I discovered that I’d been adopted, I was absolutely lost and felt totally alone. My wife was supportive, but there was no one who could really relate to the depth of loss that comes with such a discovery. My wife suggested I look on Facebook and see if there were groups formed by people who had experienced something similar. It sounded like a good idea, but I thought there would only be a handful of people at best who’ve gone through this. Instead, I found a community of thousands who have all experienced the same thing. So I lurked, devouring everyone else’s stories but not sharing my own. Over time, I observed more people sharing and receiving helpful and empathetic responses, which made me start feeling safe. And that feeling of safety finally led to me being comfortable enough to participate in the groups. I told my story to strangers who shared my experience and in return they gave me good advice and empathized. And I’ve taken it farther. Now I write about my experiences to a wider audience beyond the safety of private Facebook groups. In doing so, I’ve learned that sharing my stories has been deeply cathartic and healing. Every story I tell feels like a weight lifted off my shoulders.

As I talked to other men who have joined and participate in groups, I noticed their stories were similar to mine. They grew up learning to be self-sufficient and kept their emotions under wraps. I also noticed a common theme—a duty to keep family secrets private. I know there are many other men just like me trying to navigate their way through this NPE/MPE journey, many of them trying to go it alone. While there are likely a handful of people who can make this journey alone, I believe everyone can benefit from finding a community and experiencing its benefits.

My hope is that sharing this article and my other stories will let men know there’s a direct benefit from participating in Facebook and other support groups and sharing their stories. Cotey Bowman explains that when he works in group settings with men and is vulnerable himself, this modeled behavior is then reflected back as men in the group learn it’s safe to display emotions and vulnerability as sessions continue.Brad Ewell lives in Texas with his wife and three children. In 2019, he became a late discovery adoptee after taking a home DNA test. He feels he’s still very much in the middle of this journey and enjoys writing to help organize his thoughts and better understand his own story. Brad volunteers with Right to Know, a non-profit group dedicated to supporting people’s right to know their genetic identity. He’s told his story on two podcasts, NPE Stories and Sex, Lies, and the Truth. You can connect with him on Instagram @Brad1407, on Facebook, or email him at mpebrad@gmail.com.

Read more of his articles and essays: An Unexpected Abandonment, Dear Mom and Dad, and Watching and Waiting. *Eve Sturges is the host of a podcast, Everything’s Relative with Eve Sturges. Jodi Klugman-Rabb is the developer of Parental Identity Discovery and the co-host of the podcast Sex, Lies & the Truth. Cotey Bowman is the creator of the MPE Counseling Collective.BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.