By Pamela K. Bacon

Laurie, Randy, and Pam with their mother

For as long as I can remember, I felt different, as if I didn’t belong. I was the oldest of four children growing up in suburban Detroit. My teenage years were an emotional roller coaster full of the usual twists and turns of adolescence multiplied by my struggle to sort through the isolation of feeling like an outsider in my own family. It became clear to me that the father I lived with was not my father, so I tried very hard to keep those feelings buried away. Did I mention I hate secrets?

A few years ago, a good friend gave me a 23andMe test kit for my 62^nd birthday. I was a nurse, and she was a doctor, and as both of us were getting up in age, the topic of health topped our conversation during our daily walks. She’d done a test herself and was amazed at the health information she now had a window into. I prepared my test and sent it for analysis.

Little did I know that my results would open a whole other window of enlightenment. I received not only health information but also the names of DNA matches. Several close relatives showed up in my list of matches right below the siblings I grew up with. They were familiar names to anyone who grew up in the Detroit area back then, but not as a part of my family as I knew it growing up. The pieces were coming together, but my courage to complete the puzzle was still lacking.

In 1984, a few years after my first child was born, the father who raised me died at 53 of a sudden heart attack. In the hectic days of planning and having his memorial service, my siblings and I had time to share memories as we looked through the paperwork and gathered documents for insurance and Social Security and took care of other details that needed attention after an unexpected death. In February, while sorting through our family’s important papers, we discovered a discrepancy between the year on my birth certificate and the year listed on our parent’s marriage license. I was born in 1955, and my parents were married in 1956. That seemed strange, but there was a funeral to be held, so we moved on.

Not too long after my father’s death, I got a big boost of courage and decided to confront my suspicions head on. I was a mother myself then in my late twenties with a young son. The desire to learn the truth was still burning inside of me. I’d never seen a picture of my dad with me when I was a baby. Come to think of it, I don’t remember any pictures of me as a toddler or a young child. I don’t think there were any. My mom seemed surprised the morning I asked her if dad was my “real” father. She asked me to get something from the silver file box that held our family’s important papers.

A homemade card caught my eye—a birth announcement that proudly stated “A King is Born.” I remember my initial feelings of joy to think that maybe I had been wrong about feeling different all these years. My joy was short-lived though as I opened the card to discover it wasn’t celebrating my birth. The new King referred to my sister Laurie, who was born 22 months after me. No one does that for their second child I remember thinking to myself, I was not a King.

I returned to the kitchen table wiping away a few tears as I approached mom clutching the birth announcement in my hand. “How did you know” my mother asked. I told her that I had always felt that something was not quite right and that I hadn’t felt close to dad most of my childhood. It was something I’d kept to myself about because I was afraid of the consequences of what I might discover. “What can you tell me about my father” I muttered. She hesitatingly opened the window a bit for me that afternoon.

Mom grew up in Detroit as the oldest of six kids. She dropped out of Cooley High School in Detroit to help the family with bills while working the counter at the nearby Sanders Confectionary and Ice Cream Shop. After work, she loved to escape to the dance halls scattered around downtown Detroit to listen to the all the great entertainers that passed through. It was the winter of 1954, and she was 19 years old.

Mom said that she had a friend named Mario who frequented the neighborhood bar and pizza place. He was a boxer with a contagious personality—a friend to everyone he met. Mario looked out for my mom as a big brother would. One evening when they were hanging out, he introduced her to his buddy Mike, a nice-looking guy a bit older than she who played minor league baseball.

Mario, who was Italian, thought it was funny that Mike, who was obviously not Italian, was obsessed with pizza. “All he wanted to do was learn to make pizza” Mario later told me, so much so that he spent the off season from baseball perfecting his craft. “Your father’s name is Mike, the pizza man” my mom blurted out. That pronouncement landed like a lead balloon on my heart. All these years of wondering who I was and then this. A name. Mom didn’t really want to talk about it anymore, and I decided to leave it at that.

The birth of my first grandchild in 2015 brought back all those childhood memories of feeling that I didn’t know myself completely. My mother had passed away two years earlier, but I still had a desire to fill in the blanks. I had a strong desire to tell my son a bit more about the family secret that I had kept hidden from my own family all these years. Later, when my DNA test results revealed names that matched what my mom had told me, I mustered the courage to take another step in the discovery process.

At a family gathering in northern Michigan, I pulled my brother Randy aside. As we sat on the beach overlooking Lake Huron that summer afternoon, I shared my story and DNA test results. He was shocked at first but said that he had always thought I had been treated differently by our dad. We joked as kids that we didn’t really look like each other, and Randy had maintained that his father was probably the Twin Pines Milk Man who always seemed to linger at our house when mom was around! He never suspected that I was the one with a different father.

Randy had been doing genealogy research for quite some time on our family and was certain he could help put all the pieces together. He explained that there were multiple matches that were considered “close” relatives to me that were not common to his results. The decision to finally share with him what I had hidden away and struggled alone with all these years would connect the dots on the secrets that my mother and I had danced around for more than 60 years.

Armed with my DNA records from Ancestry and 23andMe, my brother dug into the research while I reached out to some of the higher cM number matches at the top of my list. Our goal was to confirm the identity of my biological father and gain medical and family history for me, my son, and future generations. He shared with me each discovery along the way as the picture became clearer.

Our first stop after reaching our conclusion that Mike was my father was to reach out to The DNA Detectives, created by CeCe Moore, an expert genetic genealogist who’s consulted on and appeared in many DNA specials including the PBS documentary series Finding Your Roots and more recently helped solve cold cases using genetic genealogy on the ABC series The Genetic Detective. Randy shared the information with her team, hoping her search angels could confirm our conclusion. They were incredibly helpful in building out my tree on my birth father’s side using the science of DNA results, which clearly confirmed our suspicions. Professional genealogists from Ancestry and Legacy Tree Genealogists independently came up with the same results.

I also heard back from a DNA match not long after I had initially reached out to her via email. I was hoping she could shed some light on her family and how I might fit in based on our match. She replied enthusiastically, which was a bit of a relief. She was a first cousin once removed on my father’s side, and she proclaimed “we might even have to throw you a party” in her note, saying that she had a wonderful family. I tried not to let myself get too hopeful at how welcoming and open she was, so I let some time pass before reaching out again, although I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

I shared my conversation with my brother, who was thrilled that I’d made contact and that I’d found a relative on my birth father’s side. He urged me to stay engaged with her and reminded me that I had waited all these years to open myself up to this journey, so there was no need to tiptoe around anymore. “This is your personal history, and you deserve to know” he repeated each time we spoke about it.

I called again and was relieved to get that same affirming response from her. We talked for an hour and determined that another match who listed at the highest number of cMs was her uncle and my first cousin. She confirmed that her grandfather had a brother named Michael. Mike the pizza man! I’d gotten my DNA confirmation, and now I had a new family member who confirmed my connection to the family name.

Mike was a legendary favored son in Detroit and he and several of his children were public figures with a well-known story that matched what my mom had alluded to years before. Unfortunately, he’d passed away a few years earlier in 2017, but I was able to read quite a bit about him and his accomplishments. In November 2019, I reached out to one of my newly discovered half-sisters, and we had a few good conversations via phone and text. We even talked about meeting sometime, but then she fell silent. Months passed with no response. I eventually reached out formally via a mediator who specialized in these matters and received word back that the family did not have any interest in me or my story.

Although this was not the reaction I’d hoped for from the family, I finally knew the rest of my story. My family tree was complete for me, my son, my grandchildren, and generations to follow. I’d pictured how this might turn out. I’ve seen and read so many stories of reunions with happy endings after DNA surprises, such as that of the Duck Dynasty patriarch who acknowledged and met with his adult daughter discovered through a DNA test or the GMA story of an Army general and colonel who recently reunited with their half-siblings after 50 years. I hope that someday I, too, might be acknowledged by my half-siblings. It’s a basic human need to know where you came from and to be able to tell your story. There are constant reminders of that missing piece of my heart each time I pass by one of the family restaurants or read another news story about the family.

For my parents and those from earlier generations, there was shame associated with a child born to a single mother. My mother had talked about being hidden away by her family while she was pregnant with me and how difficult it was for her during that time. Although my mother and Mike had done nothing wrong—neither was married—my mother was forced to go to the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers in downtown Detroit, where I was born in August of 1955.

The social stigma surrounding a child born out of wedlock has diminished over the years as generations have evolved, but it still exists. There are many like me who get rejected. We are left to feel as if we have done something wrong or that we should be ashamed of our history. I am still in contact with a few family members on my half-uncle’s side who have acknowledged me. And from all that I’ve read about my birthfather, I’m certain he would have welcomed me with open arms if only I’d discovered him in time. That’s what his public persona was—kind, giving, and people first. It’s not the Hollywood happy ending I envisioned over the years, but I hope that my half-siblings and I might still have the opportunity to get acquainted.Pamela King Bacon is a registered nurse from Portage, Michigan, and a proud grandmother of two grandchildren. She and her brother, Randy King, are working on a documentary about her story and their mother. You can reach her at pikbacon@icloud.com.

By Kristen SteinhilberMy whole life, when everyone told me that biology doesn’t matter, I did everything I could to believe that they were right. I learned to ignore my gut and tirelessly struggled to silence my insides that grievously screamed otherwise. It took me more than three decades of fairytale-oriented platitudes and assumptions thrown like bombs my way about adoption to piece together one very relevant thread: everyone who told me that biology doesn’t matter—including both sides of my own adoptive family—had intact bloodlines and genetic histories. And that what they were really saying, whether they meant to or not, was that my biology doesn’t matter.

Before I finally understood this, my takeaway was hardly stretch, considering the message I was sent: if my biology doesn’t matter, then I do not really matter. That’s what I believed above all else.

After my adoptive mother died, I found out she knew exactly who and where my biological family was and had kept it a secret from me. She had even allowed certain biological family members to attend my gymnastics practices without my knowledge. These kinds of things—withholding and secrecy—are encouraged in the world of adoption when it comes to the biology of adoptees. In fact, withholding and secrecy are legally enforced through sealed birth records. So when I found out, I assumed this was normal, understandable, or even maybe for my own good. My adoptive mother may have even believed that herself. Still, to know that there was nothing but a glass wall that separated me from the family I’d only daydreamed about as they watched me, or that maybe I’d accidentally brushed up against one of them on my way to get a drink from the water fountain, was a a mind fuck, even at the time. It just didn’t equate to anger the way it should have.

That’s what a person feels and should feel when they find out they have been lied to their entire lives by the person that raised them and who insisted that honesty is paramount. Anger. But since I’d always been told that adoption was such a gift, I didn’t feel I had the right to it. I pushed my own feelings away and suppressed what was in my gut. Of course, the lesson I took away from this is that my truth (or the truth in general) doesn’t hold much value. I’m not worthy or deserving of the truth; betrayals are to be immediately forgiven, no matter how all-encompassing. I applied this lesson to every aspect of my life without realizing, allowing others to manipulate me and believing them when they told me it was for my own good, telling lies myself and dismissing the feelings of those I’d wronged.

When I met my biological mother, I also found I had two sisters, one who is just four years younger than I am. Four years. So, my mother wasn’t an unfit parent, yet, through adoption, I was still legally severed from all ties having to do with her. My sisters got to grow up together, and I, an inherently and dangerously lonely only child without even the knowledge that they existed.

There is no way I at 18 (or anyone at any age for that matter) could possibly wrap my head around that thought all at once without exploding. That my mother gave me away and then had two more children, and that they all built a life that went on without me, and that the only thing that separated me from them and that life was four measly years. So I pushed it away and again, suppressed what was in my gut; the same method of self-protection I’d used my whole life. Your feelings don’t matter. Don’t have them. Biology doesn’t matter, and therefore all of the years you missed out on don’t matter either. Yes, you were the one who was given away but it doesn’t matter. You had a “better life.” Believe that, not yourself.

I had a beautiful reunion with them for years and “fit” naturally. Not in the same way that they fit with each other; that’s simply not possible when you miss out on all those years. I was also still under the thumb of the responsibility placed upon me to believe and feel they didn’t really matter. Not like the adoptive family who “saved” me. So I kept the feelings of everyone else protected and them at a distance.

Then one day they were gone. One fight was all it took. This is extremely common in biological reunion; many of our birth mothers have been both pressured to relinquish as well as shamed from every angle for relinquishing their children, not to mention having rarely been supported through their grieving process. So by the time we meet again, the combination of intense desire and fear of authentic connection often backfires, as do the reunions themselves.

During all of those years that I was included among them, I could never allow myself to be present with them. I never let myself dwell too much on the fact that my mannerisms and sense of humor are exactly like theirs and that I grew up without that. I didn’t dare admit to myself how good it felt to lay in the arms of my mother and sisters while we talked about everything under the sun and laughed in sync. I certainly never allowed myself to ask questions about my birth or the before and aftermath. I felt that would only cause upset and come across as ungrateful for the “gift” I’d always been told she had given me by giving me away. Like, “Did you ever regret your decision? Did anyone in the family want or try to keep me? Did anyone hold me or comfort me during the five days I spent in hospital nursery before I went home with my adoptive family? Did you name me? Can you tell me more about my father?”

And now, it’s too late.

After a lifetime of searching like Nancy Drew on the case of “Why am I like this?” Only now can I see my adoption trauma and maladaptive coping qualities through a lens of clarity. Because of the fairytale narrative that is everywhere and enforced by seemingly everyone who has ever seen a movie about adoption, my clarity has been systematically hidden from me. What I was conditioned to believe was self-preservation was actually self-abandonment.

The spiritual and psychological isolation of having two families but not belonging to either has ripped me from limb to limb, over and over, my entire life. My humanity has never once been seen by the adoption industry and the laws that bind, through which family ties and preservation are rendered unimportant. My voice and dignity have been robbed. Every memory of family I have is tainted either by lies or painstaking regret.

My story is not any other adoptee’s story. But the gist of it is not uncommon. These themes of diabolical dishonesty, betrayal, unbearable rejection, and hopelessness run through countless adoptees’ stories, and are begging not to be ignored.

Adoptee Rebecca Autumn Sansom made a film titled Reckoning with The Primal Wound that captures the complexities, forsaken years, and mirror smashing pain of adoption better than any other I’ve seen. My favorite part is the “Adoptee Army” featured in the credits. There’s a massive number of names listed, all those of adoptees who stand in solidarity for adoption reform. After a lifetime of feeling utterly alone, I was moved to tears seeing my name included with all of the rest.

We are the adoptee army, and our biology matters. It did all along. Steinhilber is a private domestic adoptee with a passion for adoptee rights and mental health advocacy. You can follow me her on Instagram and Twitter: @girlxadapted 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: @sandrafckingdee

By Jennifer CarraherI am the daughter of an adoptee. My mother, adopted from an orphanage when she was nine months old, was raised by parents who were loving, protective, and kind people. They raised my mother, a second adopted son, and their third and only biological child in a pastoral, rural setting where the kids rode horses to their one-room schoolhouse, kicked around in the surrounding woods and pasture, and lived a pretty idyllic existence. When my mother was 18 years old, she became pregnant with me. In a whirlwind of impulsive action, she married my birth certificate father, moved 2,000 miles away from home, and six months later gave birth to me. By the end of the year, she had packed me up, returned to her parents, and essentially disappeared the man I believed to be my father. Within the next twelve months, she remarried, gained two more young children, and, four years later, she and my stepfather had a daughter of their own. Amidst this chaos, I immediately began to identify myself as an outsider in the family: a sensitive and insecure child, an interloper among the three children of a man with whom I lived but hardly knew. In just a few years, I was both born of and made into a fatherless child.

The psychological construct known as object relations theory has shown us the cruciality of early childhood relationships to identity formation; that is, the origins of the self emerge from exchanges between the infant and others. Originally theorized by Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, the essential idea is that the infant’s bond to the parents shapes future relationships. What this means is that the mother as a physical object is invested with emotional energy from the child, and the psycho-emotional impression of the mother—the internal object—comes to represent what the infant holds in her absence. If the object formation is disrupted early in life—as, I would argue, it is with virtually all adoptees and MPEs/ NPEs*—the failure to form these early relationships leads to problems later in the child’s life. Object relations theory also points out that situations in adult life are shaped by and mirror familial experiences during infancy.

My mother’s own adoption unquestionably caused for her a failure of identity formation leading to problems in later relationships. No doubt and with good reason, the sense of attachment and security that adoptees can, and likely do, feel carries over into adult relationships in all kinds of ways. The question is how this manifests itself. Adoption is not, by any means, the only way that this attachment disruption occurs. In fact, biological children may suffer the same disruption for a variety of reasons. The lack of attachment demonstrated by my mother in her adult relationships is not necessarily a reflection of her relationship with her adoptive parents, and not all adoptees develop in this same way. In our case, whatever the disruption my mother experienced as a child, whether the result of her late-infant adoption or some other barrier to her attachment, it severely affected her identity formation. This affected identity formation is where the intergenerational disruption of object formation can be seen most clearly.

I found out about my NPE status one year ago today. While reeling from the news for many months, I had not a single thought about my mother as a child—let alone as a daughter. I was too busy contemplating the questions, “Who is my father? Where has he been? Where can he be?” Over time, I began to ask myself questions about my mother’s own history, her fractured parental bonding as an adoptee, and how this object formation may have influenced her as a new mother in the NPE scenario. How does the attachment become so fragmented that the next generation could be subjected to suffering in this way?

The foundation of the relational object is one in which, as the infant grows, she naturally wants to consolidate the work of managing her most basic needs, which are described by Klein as drives; she does this by forming an attachment to an adequate caregiver who can contain these drives. For example, how the caregiver responds to the baby’s need to eat, comforts her if she cries, and meets her most fundamental needs. If these drives are met, then a good object relationship is developed. The caregiver, usually the parent, is the “good object.” To soothe herself, the infant eventually must be able to internalize that good object.

Conversely, if the caregiver cannot accommodate the infant’s drives, then the infant will experience the drives as being out of control and instead of developing a positive attachment to the mother or caregiver, the infant may develop a negative attachment. If the caregiver herself has inadequate object relations, if her drives have not been met and she is identified with a bad object (her absent parent), then it’s possible that in order to cope, the mother will project that identification onto the baby. This defense mechanism arises so that the mother may defend herself against unbearable feelings; it also works to defend the internal object against rage, which can destroy the internal object. The mother copes with the unbearable feelings and rage by externalizing those feelings. This is called projective identification. Because of this projection, the mother may begin to see the baby’s experience as the embodiment of her own bad object and perceived reality. For example, a mother may witness the baby crying uncontrollably and in that crying she will see the manifestation of the experience from which she has tried to distance herself. Because of this, her identification with a bad object is affirmed through her projection onto that child’s crying, and the child is left carrying that projected reality.

But how does this play out in the NPE experience? In my case, the object formation disruption seems to be about the attachment with the father. If the NPE’s mother is enacting her own loss of the father object by projecting it onto the baby, the NPE child may grow to identify herself with this negative experience. This means that the child suffers the mother’s perceived losses (fatherlessness in this case) because the mother’s own drives are disorganized. Instead of nurturing and helping the child to consolidate her needs, the mother continually and repeatedly projects chaos onto the child.

Because I was born to my young mother, perhaps in the midst of this object disruption, no doubt in part due to her experience as an adoptee, she exercised her projective identification on me. This allowed for an erasure of my father, or the man I understood to be my father—the exact experience she imagined for herself. She did this not only by removing me from my birth certificate father almost immediately after my birth, but also as I grew and developed, I was told in both explicit and subconscious ways that my step-father/father figure, with whom I had lived since the age of three, could not belong to me either. When I learned in my adult life that my biological father was someone else entirely, the projection further solidified.

It is not hard to envision that—because my mother was in an orphanage, was adopted, and expressed throughout her life massive levels of alienation—she continually saw herself as severed from her family, regardless of any external reality. Every detail of her experience as an adoptee could have triggered this alienation; for example, the birth of a biological son to her adoptive parents when she was 10 years old manifested as a catastrophic event for her. So many experiences of the adopted child can contribute to this perception of severance from the family.

All of these experiences, in turn, influenced how she saw me as a child. My mother was experiencing the absent father. By enacting a dramatized reality, she was able to facilitate her projective identification as a fatherless child onto me. She played this out by running from her own (adoptive) father, disappearing my biological father, and sticking my paternity on a non-father/stranger she almost immediately abandoned. In both subtle and overt ways, I was continually reminded that my step-father was not a legitimate parent either; he could never belong to me because I didn’t “come from” him. Ultimately, though, it was all a futile effort because the enactment and projection did nothing to contain her own distress. As an example of how this played out, when I discovered my biological paternity and asked her who she thought was suffering most in this situation, she simply replied, “Your father.” Like many other NPE mothers, there’s no ability for her to imagine the suffering of the child because she is so resigned to her own suffering.

Another developmental psychological theorist and psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, theorized that the role of the father is to temper the ambivalence between the mother and the child. Ambivalence arises when the needs of the parent and the needs of the child are in conflict. Maternal ambivalence, specifically as theorized by Freud, is a universal maternal experience in which the feelings of love and hate for the child can exist side by side. When the father is absent, there is what Freud calls an ever-present “third” in the mother’s unconscious mind. For the NPE, the role of the father to modulate the mother-child relationship does not exist. This may be why so many of us have long-standing conflict with our mothers and spend years saying things like, of all of the children, I was always the outsider, or I never understood why I didn’t fit in, or asking why did she dislike me, what did I do wrong, and, eventually, why could I not have known my father? The answer to all of these questions lies quite simply in the projective identification of the mother onto her child: “If I can’t have a father, neither can you.”

While my mother may have subconsciously or otherwise attempted to make me into a fatherless child, I do not see myself that way. In fact, I don’t actually believe that my mother perceives me as without a father. She sees it only in herself, and she projects her own suffering as an internalized, fatherless child onto me. I have come to understand over the protracted and immensely heavy year since my misattributed parent discovery, that even as NPEs, even through all of our intuitions and suspicions, detachments and alienations growing up, we do have fathers. We should never diminish the significance of this fact because if we continue the pattern of projection of the fatherless child in our own lives, the cycle can never be broken. The gift of the NPE discovery is the acknowledgement of what has been lost to us, the chance to discover ourselves anew in order to protect our own children by offering them our solid and unwavering belief in their fathers. The only way to do this, I am afraid, is to begin to forgive our mothers.

*MPE/NPE: misattributed parentage experience/not parent expected or nonpaternity eventJennifer Carraher lives with her family in Sebastopol, California, where she’s an advanced practice public health nurse in the areas of women’s health and forensics. She’s also a medical sociologist who has worked extensively over the past 20 years in assisted reproductive technologies, kinship, and the social studies of science. Her current research is dedicated to promoting harm reduction as medical practice.   

Since her misattributed parent discovery in December 2020, she has established The Mendel Project, which will provide DNA testing and genetic support at no cost to patients in the hospital setting. She also continues to collect narratives from other adoptees, NPEs, and those affected by genetic surprises for the podcast Unfinished Truths. Find her at themendelgeneticproject@gmail.com & unfinishedtruths@gmail.com.