By Sherrie L. KappaMy biological mother met my biological father in Alexandria, Virginia. I was told she met him after she had locked her keys in her car and he was a local fireman who came to help her.

I was born in 1961 in West Virginia and adopted by a family that had a 9-year-old biological daughter. My adoptive father was a coal miner and a pastor of a church, and my adoptive mother did not work.

They had not planned to disclose my adoption to me, but I learned about it by accident when I was 13 years old and  found a letter my adoptive mother had written to another pastor’s wife in which she stated she had two adopted children—a teen daughter and a young son. My best friend was there with me and she confirmed that I was adopted and that everyone knew but me. Too scared to ask my often abusive, narcissistic mother, I waited until my father came home from work. He verified that it was true. He was a sweet man and hated lies. I think it was a relief to him.

That weekend he took me to meet my biological mother. He said he’d met her when she was only a few months pregnant. She was a waitress in a bar, and he was at the bar, he said, trying to save souls. He told her that she should be taking better care of herself, and she told him that she didn’t want the child and that he could have it when it was born. He gave her his phone number. In September of that year, she called and told him I had come early and was sick. I’d been diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome, and the doctors transfused my blood. My biological mother signed the forms to relinquish me for adoption and left the hospital before my adoptive parents arrived to pay the hospital bill and bring me home.

Several months after I found out about being adopted, I ran away to my biological mother’s home and met three half siblings. I learned that she’d also relinquished a 6-year-old son the same year I was born. My birthmother called my adoptive father to come pick me up and also called police to scare me into not coming back. Needless to say, I did not have any further contact with my birthmother until my older brother came looking for me when I was 16.

My adoptive father had a heart attack and died that same year, after which my adoptive mother decided I needed to work to pay rent, so I attended high school during the day and worked a full-time job at night at the local hospital. On my days off, I cleaned for her. She took my entire check every month. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, unless you’ve lived through it. She informed me that I would not be going to college; she wasn’t going to pay for a child that was not her blood.

I graduated high school when I was 17, immediately married my brother’s best friend, and got out. About six months later, we moved to the same town in which my biological mother and her family lived. My biological mother adored my husband, and this paved the way for me to try to be a part of her life. I lived right up the street from her house for four years, and although she never once visited me, I was invited to her home on the rare occasion. I believe I valued those visits much more than she did

I asked my birthmother who my father was. She said his name was Bennie H., he lived in Mockingbird, Texas, and worked for Bekins Transportation. She said he had blue eyes and his wife was Chinese, but she didn’t know much else. She’d  told him she was pregnant, and he took off. For many years I tried to find Bennie H. I called Bekins. I found out there is no Mockingbird, Texas, so called Information for towns all over the state. Most of the operators were kind; they would give me five numbers and five addresses at a time. I wrote nearly 100 letters. And when I had the money, I called as many numbers as I could.

In the early 1980s, along came the Internet, and I wrote or called every Bennie H. I could find, without luck. Lots of Google searches, lots of Yahoo searches. I couldn’t find any Bennie H. in Texas.

My life often interrupted my search, but I never gave up. I worked full time, divorced, re-married, and raised a son. I went back to school to obtain a degree, often working two jobs.

Along came Facebook. Same searches. Nothing new.

In 2016, my best friend and I discussed her search. She was looking for a grandfather, and she suggested I join a Facebook group for people using DNA to search for family; she also suggested several DNA testing sites that she was using. I sent my test to Ancestry and found a group on Facebook that had “search angels.” They pointed me toward several adoption registries, and I signed up with all of them.

About three days later, I got an email that one of the Angels had found a Bennie H. in an old 1961 Dallas city registry.  And there he was, listed as living on Mockingbird Lane. As it turned out, this was actually the address of Bekins, his employer. He lied to my mother so she wouldn’t track him down. The “angel” also gave me information on a Bennie in Kansas and one in North Carolina.

I called the number in North Carolina. It was the right one. I talked with his brother, and Bennie had been there all along, about a three-hour drive from my front door. He had died just eight months before my call. I talked to an aunt and uncle who told me about two sisters on the east coast and two in Texas, but they didn’t want to give me any other information. But I stalked, and within two days I had the married names and the telephone number of all four sisters.

I called and I wrote to each of them. We talked and texted and became friends. A few months later, I met two of them and the uncle on the east coast, and we made plans for all five sisters to get together. They shared pictures of Bennie, and although he didn’t look like me, I tried really hard in my head to make my blue eyes look just like his. And the curl in my hair to match his. And in my mind, his father, my grandfather, looked so much like my son.

I obtained his military records and learned that he has O+ blood, which I’m pretty sure my biological mother has as well. I am A negative—slightly rare, though not enormously so. So I called my maternal half-sister and asked if she thought our mother has type A blood. “Oh sure”, she says, “she does.”

I’d been asking the eldest paternal sister to do take an Ancestry DNA test so I could see “sister” come up on my computer screen. While waiting on my own DNA test results, I built an extensive Ancestry tree, tracing Bennie all the way back to 1040, to the original “H.”

Nine months into this journey, the eldest sister finally took the test.

In the middle of this madness, I received my DNA test results and saw those Hs. Among my matches was a second cousin, Leslie, who contacted me. She wasn’t from the H family, she said. “We’re the C family and you are my cousin.” We puzzled back and forth about this for several months, but we couldn’t seem to agree on how we were related so I let it go.

When my new paternal sister’s DNA results came in, they showed that we are not a match. They were Bennie’s children. I was not his child. We share cousins approximately six to eight generations back. We connect to the same H ancestors I observed among the 1,500 or so DNA matches. I cried. My new “not my sisters” cried. I have been looking for these girls all my life. I’d become attached. I loved them.

But they don’t belong to me at all. They are not family. They told me it didn’t matter, but oh boy, it sure does.

My mother at that point was old and sick so I didn’t call her directly to ask again who my biological father was. Instead, I called my maternal half-sister. She asked my mother, and my mother once again lied, insisting that Bennie H. was my father. She said the DNA was wrong and I was lying. I upset my mother, and my sister told me never to contact them again—any of them. A few cousins still talk to me on Facebook, but I won’t be getting any invitations to the family reunions.

After crying on the phone to an Ancestry representative for nearly an hour, asking if my DNA results could somehow be wrong, the representative explained to me that DNA does not lie. With her help, I started over with my Ancestry DNA tree. My new tree had only two leaves—one for me and one for my biological mother. Within a day, new half-sister, Lisa, turned up in my matches. I contacted her, and she said it was possible that we were sisters, that her father had many extramarital affairs. But, she said, he was mean, an alcoholic, and a pedophile, and the four living siblings didn’t want anything to do with me. I cried more. My new family didn’t want to talk to me at all. They were ashamed that I was alive. Two others are already dead and don’t get an opinion. She gave me that one day in which to ask questions, which she answered, and then she blocked me on Ancestry and on Facebook, as did all her (my) other siblings and their children.

I pull up my bootstraps and keep going on in this mad world.

But I have my father’s name—the real one—William C. And pictures shared on Ancestry. In them is my face, my son’s face. There’s no denying this DNA. By gosh, I actually look like someone.

I am one of 12 children between these two biological parents, and none other than my younger maternal half-brother wants me. He tries, but he has his own very full life with not a lot of time for a sister four hours away. He doesn’t want to get in between all the madness of my relationship with my maternal siblings and my biological mother, who don’t want me in their lives, but he and I do talk, and he is my one and only lifeline.

My adoptive siblings, a brother and a sister, now no longer talk to me either. They told me years ago that I should not have tried looking for biological family, that I should have been happy with the one I had. They say that they know I never wanted to be in their family. (They’re most certainly right about that one.) So I’ve had to let them go as well.

As for my friends and cousins, I wish they’d stop saying, “But at least you had a good family to raise you.” They only see what I have allowed them to see. I’ve gone through the gamut of emotions over this: anger—lots and lots of anger; grief over of losing someone I never met, over losing someone I looked for 40 years, over losing sisters that were not my sisters. I feel disconnected every single day.

I’m not putting all this out here so anyone will feel sorry for me. My story is much nicer than that of many I have read. I now know my truth. I have a wonderful husband. He works hard, he loves me, and is my best friend. I have the very best son. He’s much like his dad—he works hard and he loves his momma. He has a hard time with relationships though; he’s had no family around him growing up—no aunts, uncles, cousins, or siblings. No one. Much like me. All alone, always. He doesn’t want children. And his aloneness makes me saddest of all.Sherrie L. Kappa lives in North Carolina with her husband and fur baby. She’s a medical staff professional and volunteers with a DNA research group. To date, she’s helped 34 individuals find and connect with their biological family.

By Dawn DaviesIt was winter up North. I was four, riding shotgun with my dad in a car on the highway. The naked trees scarred the grey sky, and now and again, birds flocked and dipped in the wind like shards of glass slicing the clouds. My cheeks burned hot. My dad had rolled the driver’s side window down an inch and the whistle of the cold wind sucked his cigarette smoke out the crack. Every time he took a drag, the tip of his cigarette glowed orange underneath the grey of the ash. When it got low, he lit a fresh one from it, then tossed the butt out the window. The inside of the car smelled like Kool menthols, sedan vinyl, and drugstore aftershave.

I was unbuckled because we all were back then, and I fidgeted in my seat, uncomfortably eager to reach a bridge I would be able to see from the driver’s side window. I didn’t know why I felt nervous, only that I had a knot in my stomach that periodically lurched into my throat.

When we got close to the bridge, I slid across the bench seat, grab my dad’s arm, and peered down the divide between the two sides of the highway into a gully that led to a tunnel, where I got a quick glimpse of a black hole framed by the arch of the bridge. I could never quite see what was inside that little hole, but I kept trying. I needed to see it, but I didn’t know why.

I suppressed a thrill of fear whenever I saw it. Mostly I feared missing the opportunity to look inside the hole, because I believed I must look inside it, or else the day would go wrong. The hole bothered me then, and the memory of it bothering me has bothered me for most of my life, with the kind of prodding nag you feel when you are on a 46-year hike and there is a pebble in your shoe. You can ignore it for a while, but eventually it rubs, then blisters, then becomes infected. Then it festers and begins to rot, and you worry about it possibly killing you.

For years I didn’t remember where we went on those rides, so I didn’t know what to make of the memories, or of my fear of seeing that bridge, so I banked them alongside other memories that made no sense, like the time I was awakened from sleep by yelling and the shattering of the storm door glass, and the next day, after the doctor had stitched up my mother’s hand, I broke the household silence by asking what had happened and my parents said, “Nothing.” Or when I once got up the courage to ask my dad why he was always so mad at me, he told me to ask my mother, and the bitter way he said it made me afraid of the truth. Or that time when, after several years of chasing his love and not catching it, I asked my mother if he was my real father and she said, “Shame on you.”

Years later, while visiting my dad, I brought up that morning drive and the bridge and he said, “That was when I used to take you to daycare.”

“I went to daycare?”

“You don’t remember? It was a home daycare. Run by a guy. You cried every time we pulled up there. Every day for a year you cried, and I never knew why.”

“And you kept dropping me off there? To a home daycare center run by a guy? To a place that made me cry every day?”

He shrugged.

“Lots of things made you cry.” He shrugged again. He was dying from cancer at the time, so I didn’t push, but a bolt of electricity shot through me. My husband, who was with us, raised his eyebrows and gave me a look of alarm, while my soul cracked and shards of it flew off like birds in a long-ago winter sky. My cheeks burned hot and I felt jitters akin to those I had felt when I looked for that hole under the arch of the bridge so many years before. My body puffed up like a balloon, rose to the ceiling, and tried to find a way out of the room. I needed to get home. Later that night, I couldn’t sleep.

I know most recollection involves reconstruction, and most reconstruction involves some sort of distortion of exactitude, especially early memories, so we are right to question ourselves. As a memoirist, I do this often. I even question my subjective truth and sometimes feel guilt when I have a memory I think someone else won’t like. This could relate to how my family viewed truth. Even into adulthood I was told by my parents that what I experienced—or what I believed or what I witnessed—either was not true or was not worth paying attention to, which may be why my dad could repeatedly leave me at a place that made me cry every time we pulled up to it. Or why, when after the 23andMe results came back showing that he and I were unrelated, my mother told me it was a mistake and the DNA test must be wrong.

I can’t know for certain, but I suspect this emotional trickery has affected my short-term memory even now, since I often struggle to precisely remember things that have recently happened, specifically things people say in heated conversation, especially when I am upset. And during conflict, even though I have no interest in it doing so, my body tries to puff up like a balloon and find a way out of the room.

After my dad died, the fragments of this part of my childhood came out of my mind like shards working their way out of my skin. They found each other and glided in place in a tectonic way, fusing into a coherence I hadn’t possessed at age four or seven or ten because I’d had no context.

Enlightenment is often delivered by the plunging of a two-edged sword. You get the truth, but then you must live with it. I think I understand why my dad was so cavalier about what happened to me, then, and throughout the rest of my life—I wasn’t his child and he knew it, and what’s worse, he’d been tricked into thinking I was. I also understand why I cried every time we pulled up to the daycare, thought I don’t remember much more than what I’m about to say and I’ve no interest in trying. This will be the last I speak of it:

It was winter up North and I was four. My dad drove me to daycare in a smoke-filled car. It was part of our morning routine. Each day we passed a bridge with an arch, and inside that arch was a little hole that terrified me every time we saw it. When we pulled up to the plain house off the highway, I cried, then my dad peeled me off his legs and led me up the front steps to the house, where I went inside and watched from the window of a weatherized front room while he drove away. There were paper cups with juice and plastic bowls of graham crackers. There were other kids who were, like me, too young to go to school. There was a medium-sized man with a beard who wore his camera like a necklace. He held my hand as we walked down the cellar steps for our special time together.

“Isn’t this fun,” he’d say. “We’re going to play a game. Let’s take off your shirt and you can show me your belly. Now your panties. Good girl. Lie back on the beanbag. Smile. Bend your legs like a frog. Show me where you go pee. Let me see that little hole.”Dawn Davies is the author of Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces (Flatiron Books, 2018), which won the Florida Book Award Gold Medal for General Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her essays and stories have been Pushcart Special Mentions and Best American notables. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, The Alaska Review, Narrative, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. She lives in Florida. Visit her website and find her on Instagram @dawnlandia.