Short Takes

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 quests of seekers in search of their lineages—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 question about heritage, ethnicity, race, culture, and privacy.” And for others, she demonstrates, it validates both vague intuition and long-held suspicions.

Direct-to-consumer DNA testing via Ancestry, 23andMe, and other companies has rapidly replaced the arduous tasks of hands-on library research, grave searching, and contacting strangers for the purposes of finding long-lost relatives—a tremendous advance since just a decade ago, when locating biological family or records to validate family lineage was a near impossible feat.

While these tests—which rely on saliva samples—are simple, quick, and affordable, interpreting the results is often a confusing and time-intensive process.

An International Case

In November 2019, I took on a special challenge that illustrated the tenacity needed to solve cases. The case involved a search for records from Panama and Columbia to help determine the client’s origins. Bob called on DNAngels to help him find his mother’s biological father. Ann, his mother, was born in New York in 1961 and raised by an Italian-American mother and stepfather. Her mother refused to tell her who her biological father was and took his name to the grave. Ann thought that was it—that she’d never know her paternal family—and gave up on the thought of trying to find him.

Bob, wanting to help his mother in any way possible, ordered Ancestry DNA tests for her, himself, his sister, and a few other relatives. Once he received the kits, he mailed them back immediately in hopes of finding the man Ann had spent decades wondering about and answering her questions. Was he tall? Was he a nice man? Where was he raised? What were his parents like? What did he look like?

Bob found the results that came in a few weeks later both exciting and confusing. Ann’s ethnicity report had significant amounts of Spanish, Panamanian, and Columbian heritage. This gave them their first clue about where her biological father could be from. For Bob, looking at the numbers and trying to figure what it all meant was like trying to read a foreign language. He needed help.

It was a movement waiting to happen. It only needed a catalyst. Enter Dr. Laura Schlessinger, an unapologetic bully and “infotainment” therapist masquerading as a helping professional. Host of the Dr. Laura Program heard daily on Sirius XM, Schlessinger bills herself as a “talk radio and podcast host offering no-nonsense advice infused with a strong sense of ethics, accountability and personal responsibility.” A Los Angeles marriage and family therapist, she’s no stranger to controversy, for example, when it became known that in the early days of her a television program, her staff posed as guests or when, two decades ago, she declared that homosexuality was “a biological error” and made racist comments that temporarily derailed her radio career. Now, with audience of eight million, her Sirius XM audience doesn’t shy away from the sensationalism that ratchets up the ratings.

Recently, she directed her venom at NPEs (not parent expected.)

On July 7, a segment of “The Call of the Day”—“My Mom Never Told Me the Truth”—was subtitled, “Torri’s uncertain she can continue to have a relationship with her mom after discovering her dad is not her biological father.” The caller, Torri, sought Schlessinger’s help, stating that she wasn’t sure how to continue on in her relationship with her mother after learning, only recently, that her dad wasn’t her biological father. Schlessinger asked Torri if the man who raised her was nice, and when Torri said he was, Schlessinger launched into an assumption-filled toxic diatribe. She berated Torri, asking “What in the hell is wrong with you?” When Torri tried to explain she was upset by her mother’s lying, Schlessinger responded by saying, “So what? So what? Who gives a shit?”

The DNA discovery situation is unique in several ways. It’s unique to our time because of our access to science, and it’s unique in mental health because of the combination of issues triggered throughout the experience. Those who experience an unexpected DNA discovery may include adoptees, NPEs (not parent expected), and donor conceived individuals. Although they take different paths to their DNA discoveries, the emotional issues they experience along the way are quite related and, in some cases, identical. Yet, the mental health community isn’t at all well-prepared to deal with the DNA discovery experience.

Astonishingly, there are practicing therapists who cannot engage their empathy when facing a DNA discovery client. I hear stories of NPEs leaving sessions feeling worse than they did going in because the therapists dismissed their pain, just as their known families did. After seeking help to sort out their feelings and cope with their confusion, these clients leave with guilt added to the cornucopia of emotional turmoil, being told by therapists “he’s still your dad” or “it really hasn’t changed anything about you.”

In fact, much has changed for NPEs, but as in any case of grief, it often isn’t apparent to the outside observer. I counsel as many bereaved clients on how to engage support from loved ones as I do NPEs, and that’s because we as a species are not good at dealing with emotional pain. We want it to go away, to be as short lived as possible and be something someone else deals with. The DNA discovery experience rivals most traumas—with sudden grief and loss, unwanted changes in family dynamics, and profound identity confusion, all condensed in a short period of time.

Our fellow adoptees are in need. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted many aspects of life across the world. Many people are struggling to obtain basic necessities while countless others are hurting due to lack of job security. During these hard times, we want to recognize and support our community members who are without citizenship, and thus have limited/no access to unemployment benefits, healthcare, housing, food, COVID-19 testing/treatment and will not receive a stimulus check. 

Cindy’s story: Cindy is an adoptee, and like many of us, she is struggling because of COVID-19. She doesn’t have support from her adoptive family, and as a single mom, she has to take care of her young daughter while still working to pay for basic necessities like food and utilities. Because of Cindy’s current situation, she can’t receive any type of benefits. 

Cindy: “As a single mother, working minimum wage 7 days a week is difficult, but you have to survive.”

But Cindy is one out of what is estimated to be thousands of adoptees without citizenship. Many who would most likely be excluded from relief packages like the CARES Act even though she would otherwise be eligible. In response, Adoptees For Justice has established the A4J COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund to provide financial assistance to adoptees without citizenship.

Just over a decade ago, when autosomal DNA tests first hit the marketplace, offering consumers a new tool for advancing genealogical research and a way to discover genetic cousins, few imagined how popular these tests would become. In this short span, more than 26 million Americans have traded a hundred bucks and a spit or swab sample of DNA for a backward glimpse into their ancestry.

The majority of testers get precisely what they pay for—a pie chart indicating their ancestral heritage and a list of DNA cousin matches. They learn from whence and from whom they came—information that makes them feel better connected to their forbears and more knowledgeable about themselves in some essential way. Countless others, however, get much more than they bargain for and—sometimes—more than they can handle. For these consumers, DNA testing leads to a genetic disconnect from their families and the erasure of an entire swath of their self-knowledge. They discover that they’re genetically unrelated to one or more of their parents.

Even more shocking than the existence of these genetic disconnects is their sheer numbers. Although no one knows exactly how many testers have discovered misattributed parentage—and estimates within general population are likely overstated—headline after headline and the swelling ranks of secret Facebook groups devoted to supporting those disenfranchised from their families suggests the numbers are significant.

Many of us are preoccupied with the question “Who’s your daddy?” and pin our hopes on science—a DNA test—to provide clarity. According to Nara B. Milanich, author of “Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father,” the question has been asked for millennia, but it wasn’t until the early 20th century that people looked to science rather than society for the answer. And while the conundrum has been debated through the ages and far and wide, it’s a far more complex matter than it appears to be, the author argues. Despite science, she insists, there’s still no consensus about who is a father or what it means to be a father.

While the need to pinpoint paternity has been driven for various reasons throughout history by a variety of stakeholders—mothers, putative fathers, potential heirs, lawyers, champions of eugenics—there are modern twists. “The orphaned and the adopted have asked this question in relation to lost identities,” says Milanich. “More recently, assisted reproductive technologies—gamete donation, surrogacy—have raised old issue in new ways.”

A professor of history at Barnard College, the author traces the history of the understanding of paternity across time and cultures and analyzes the many ways fatherhood is defined—socially, legally, politically, and biologically—and explores the consequences and implications of the different means of establishing paternity, which, she observes, bequeaths not only one’s name but also identity, nationality, and legitimacy.

Complex feelings and experiences—like those associated with genetic identity—may be difficult to share through words alone. But art can get to the heart of the matter and communicate more compellingly the tangled emotions and nuances of experiences that arise from grappling with genetic identity issues. There are myriad benefits of artistic expression. Not surprisingly, art is widely known to be a therapeutic strategy, both healing the creators and engendering understanding and empathy in those exposed to it.

If you’re donor conceived and have a creative spirit and a point of view to share, there’s a new platform for your expressive projects. Donor-Conceived Voices is a website created to exhibit artistic works that express “both the joy of discovery and the hardship of rejection, the truth of our complex existence exposed in many forms for all to witness.”

In her new podcast, Everything’s Relative, writer and therapist Eve Sturges talks with individuals whose worlds have been upended by DNA surprises.

She sits down, for example, with Joy, who was told at age 10 she was donor conceived and who, growing up, had little if any interest in her birthfather. But when facts later emerged to demonstrate how much like him she was, she became driven to learn everything she could about him—a process she likened to dating—and thus developed a profound relationship with a man she’d never known, the birthfather who died many years earlier. As Sturges observed, Joy didn’t know she was missing pieces until the pieces fell into place.

And there’s Mesa, who, before learning that she was an NPE, had had a tumultuous childhood and already was no stranger to trauma. Her discovery triggered a bewildering identity crisis; suddenly she had a Hispanic heritage about which she knew nothing. Learning that she had no connection to the family she’d grown up thinking were “her people” and wanting to connect with her biological family turned her life upside down. In situations such as these, Sturges observed, where NPEs reach out and connect with their biological families, they in some ways also must become disconnected from the family they’ve known.

When he was only 25 years old and working as a speechwriter for Barack Obama, Adam Frankel learned a searing truth about himself—one his mother intended him to live his days without knowing.

Secrets, he says, were “something of a family tradition.” His mother, who suffered from an ill-defined mental illness and who at least once tried to take her own life, refused in his youth to tell him why she and his father divorced before he was five years old.  As an adult, he pushed back on his mother’s reluctance to share this family history, until finally the truth came out: his dad was not his biological father.

“I wanted to climb out of my skin,” he recalls. “I felt disembodied. I looked down at my legs, arms, hands. All of it suddenly felt so unfamiliar, like I was inhabiting a stranger’s body.” He was, in that instant, “undone.”

“The Survivors: A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing” traces Frankel’s agonizing quest to find and come to terms with his truth—to heal what he describes as a rupture in his heart.

It’s surely not hyperbole to say that “A Broken Tree: How DNA Exposed a Family’s Secrets”—a new book by Stephen F. Anderson—is the mother of all NPE (not parent expected) stories. It’s hard to imagine a more epic or stranger-than-fiction tale of misattributed parentage than this.

Anderson stared down a series of family mysteries and over decades employed DNA and oral history in an attempt to solve them. He describes his family of nine children as nothing like the “Leave it to Beaver” family he grew up watching on television. He knew his was different, but it took decades to learn just how different.

Because his mother, Linda, had little interest in settling down to raise kids and clean houses, and his father, Mark, a fire truck salesman, was on the road a great deal of the time, his older sisters took on much of the burden of caring for the younger children. There were rumors and whispers among the siblings of family secrets, but they were too disjointed and fragmentary to be understood. He turned to the person he most expected to have answers, but was rebuffed. He visited his oldest sister, Holly, to record stories about the family, and she refused to share a single recollection.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Center for Health and Coping Studies in the department of psychology are exploring individuals’ motivations for taking DNA tests and the impact of the results.

People take DNA tests for a host of reasons, from wanting to know their ethnic backgrounds to a desire to augment their genealogical research. Increasingly often, however, individuals take direct-to-consumer DNA tests as part of an effort to discover and connect with their biological families. With these discoveries and connections often come emotional repercussions and significant challenges.

Adoptees, donor-conceived individuals, and other NPEs (not parent expected) rarely have an opportunity to contribute to research about issues that matter to them, but now they can make a difference.

The second season of novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro’s riveting “Family Secrets” podcast recently launched in iTunes’ Top 10, a testament to the fact that humans have a deep desire to see what’s behind the curtain, to get at the truth of what we hide or what’s been hidden from us. The author deftly satisfies this urge, indulging our voyeuristic impulses as she unburdens guests of their long-held deepest secrets and bears witness to the lasting impact, both of the secrets themselves and of their ultimate revelations.

But there’s nothing sensationalized or salacious about these secrets or their disclosures. Even as guests detail stories we might never have imagined, sometimes mournful and often harrowing, they reveal a slice of common humanity. Shapiro in each episode homes in on the core emotions from which virtually all secrets arise and which all secrets arouse—shame, guilt, fear—feelings that resonate for everyone and, thus, stir empathy and compassion.

Author Dani Shapiro has explored family secrets from every angle in an exceptional decades-long writing career that until now yielded five novels and four memoirs. Revisiting those works, it’s tempting to believe everything she’s experienced and written has been prelude to her 10th book, the bestselling “Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love.” In an earlier memoir, for example, “Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life,” she describes herself in childhood as having been strangely aware unknowns were waiting to be discovered.