By Andromeda Romano-LaxThe gossip reaches me on New Year’s Eve, two days after my birthday—worth mentioning only because birthdays often put me in a reflective state that can easily turn to melancholy, and this year is no different. I’m in Mexico City, on vacation, about to go to dinner with my husband, mood beginning to lift. Then I receive the email from my sister.
It reads: “Considering that Mom could pass any day, I thought I should tell you a.s.a.p. in case you don’t know about it, which I assume you don’t.”
The news she shares is second-hand gossip from an old family “friend” who showed up to visit my mother—then dying of brain cancer—to reminisce, burn private letters and relive the good old days. The friend, who played little part in any of our lives for decades, revealed to another family member that my father wasn’t really my father. That person told the sister who emailed me. Now I’m the last in the four-person chain to find out.
As for my mom: she’s not talking, and never will, which isn’t surprising given her love of secrets and lifelong fear of being judged for parenting errors. Her fears are valid. I do judge her, most of all for not keeping my sisters safe when we were all younger.
Before leaving our hotel room to go to dinner, I reply to my sister: “That’s a big surprise! How lucky I don’t feel especially attached to ‘Dad’ or his side of the family or it could be upsetting.”
I take pride in my stoic response and the fact that I severed relations years ago with our late father—an undeniably “bad man.” But that stoicism is really only disorientation. I have no idea, at this time, that my identity and much of what I’d thought about both my parents will have to be recalibrated.
I never would have imagined that my mom, a self-identified, non-practicing Catholic with an affinity for the Virgin Mary, probably had multiple affairs when she was still married to her first husband, who came from a large Sicilian-Polish family. But there was a lot about our family I never suspected until each bomb dropped: for example, when, at age 14, I learned that my two older sisters, then 16 and 19, had been molested for years by the sweet-tempered, funny and charming man we called “Dad.”
The truth came out in jarring bursts. I remember a confusing scene in our living room when my sisters, in some argument with my mother, summoned the courage or rage to tell her what had happened to them. I can’t recall any words from my mom’s side, only my oldest sister’s repeating howls: “Oh no, oh no, oh no.” Until that point, she’d thought she was the only one. The knowledge that she hadn’t managed to stop the predator she knew well from seeking a second, even weaker prey—our middle sister—shattered her.
I remember a second confusing scene later that year, when our middle sister was locked in a downstairs bathroom. Her boyfriend called to tell me I needed to break down the door. Inside, she was trying to take her life. The boyfriend—bless his bravery and candor—told me why. It was Dad, again. I don’t know who made the 911 call. I do know I found my sister’s unconscious body. While everyone else converged at the hospital, I was left home alone to clean up the blood.
My parents divorced when I was three. The last time I saw my dad I was fourteen. I have no memory of him ever touching me. I find it incredible, even now, to think about the lengths he went to abuse my sisters—using not only emotional manipulation but also drugs and travel across international borders to conceal what he was doing. In other words, he was not only giving in briefly to unhealthy urges—as if that isn’t bad enough. He planned his molestation. He took steps to avoid prosecution.
After connecting the dots between his strategic, predatory behavior and my sisters’ exceptionally difficult teen years, I refused to see our father again, and he made no effort to ask why I’d stopped calling or hadn’t attended his father’s funeral. I think he felt a cold wind blowing. I think he knew there was at least one person—and maybe more—who had seen under his mask. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he retired to Mexico not too many years later. He died when I was in my late thirties.
And now, in my mid-forties, I’m being told that he wasn’t my biological father after all.
***
After the surprise settles and the DNA swab test results are returned, I look for the silver lining. He was a sick, morally bankrupt person. Isn’t it better to think I share no genes with him or any of his ancestors? Not that I believe pedophilia or an inclination to abuse is passed along genetically. No doubt his actions were a result of his environment. I have every reason to suspect my grandfather sexually abused his own daughters (my father’s sisters) as well. It’s even possible that my father was himself abused. Perhaps—the thought evolves in my mind as time passes—it was even condoned.
“Better to keep it in the family,” is the horrible phrase that comes to mind.
For a long time, I’m tempted to blame heritage, poverty, or lack of education for the practices that seemed accepted—though never openly talked about—in my father’s family. Even now I can cite recent news from Italy, where in some parts of the country, incest and sexual abuse are condoned. (In Italy, incest is illegal only if it “provokes scandal,” which sounds terrible, until you consider that in Spain, France and Portugal, it isn’t illegal, period.)
But any quick survey, like easy finger-pointing at priests or coaches or other groups, overlooks the fact that sexual abuse is discouragingly common everywhere. Writes Mia Fontaine in a story called “America has an incest problem” in The Atlantic, “One in three-to-four girls, and one in five-to-seven boys are sexually abused before they turn 18, an overwhelming incidence of which happens within the family.” Those figures are underestimates, due to underreporting.
If incest was preferable in my father’s family to affairs with grown women or molestation of children outside the family, then I have one answer to the question of why a non-biological child would be left alone. But did my father know I wasn’t his child? He never deprived me of appropriate affection. I felt loved, even when, at the age of 13, I cut off my hair and went through a punk phase that would last years.
Maybe that punk phase and my insistence on androgyny—or my manner, a “don’t FUCK with me” vibe that I mastered well before I had any reason to suspect my father of being a child molester, was one reason I was left alone, completely apart from blood relations. That’s what I would have said, as a young adult.
It’s comforting to think we have agency. It’s even more reassuring to think we can fashion the right armor for ourselves, and that perhaps some of us know, subconsciously, that such armor is needed. But it would be dangerous—as well as self-serving—to assume that one can so easily guarantee one’s own safety by acting or dressing a certain way. Life teaches us otherwise.
There are other possibilities, like birth order or simple opportunity, to explain why I wasn’t violated—or not violated yet—in the time before I broke off contact. (And note: I made that choice at the age of 14. My mother registered no opinion or even said a negative word about my father, as I can recall—clinging to her belief that it’s better not to judge people. She was frighteningly consistent, if nothing else.)
In any case, I was lucky—at least once, and maybe twice. Lucky because I was left untouched. Lucky again, because I was, and still am, free to imagine my biological father was a better person than the first man my mother married.
*
After my DNA surprise, a cousin reaches out and offers to help find my bio-dad. I’m reluctant. My own family history has convinced me to beware fathers, generally. There’s a good chance I’ll leave one “Dad” behind only to find a new one with his own character flaws or criminal background—someone who might want to take advantage of me. Even as an adult, I feel emotionally vulnerable.
My “amateur detective” cousin keeps sending messages—she enjoys these kinds of searches and excels at them—and I finally relent. Less than a month later, she introduces me to the identity of my bio-dad. His photo and other details provided by his living siblings leave no doubt. I experience the shock of seeing my own features, as well as that of my adult son, in the face of a stranger. I experience the double-shock of realizing this matters to me, when I thought it wouldn’t. I can’t stop clicking on the digital photos sent to me of his face at three ages—young boy, adolescent, twenty-something man—and finding them both familiar and somehow comforting.
More details emerge. My biological father is no longer alive, having died in an accident just a week before my birth. His long-ago passing was both tragic—not only for him and his family but probably for my late mother, who must have spent that final week of pregnancy in deep grief. But in a strange way, in addition to sadness and belated sympathy, I feel relief. I have nothing to fear from this new biological relative. I can accept without wariness or doubt the good details I hear: that he was a kind brother, for example.
Even with a new father to think about, I spend more time mulling the old one—trying to find consolation in knowing that we aren’t related. Given the frequency of DNA surprises, how many people are at first relieved to discover they aren’t related to a parent who was a murderer, or carrying some heritable disease, or simply unlucky in life? Especially if we are the children of someone who did something heinous, the ground shifts. We struggle to regain our footing, hoping to land in a better spot than we were before.
And yet, that’s not the whole story, either. As the news continues to sink in over the next year, I realize I’ve lost a lot. Anyone who has experienced a DNA-testing surprise may understand. Now, my sisters are only half-sisters, and my mother has been proven to be not only a person who hid the truth, but someone who wouldn’t relent even when asked directly, smiling in response to my sister’s questions. If she’d become upset, I would have sympathized. But a Cheshire-cat smile, tickled by the power of what she had to withhold? That’s harder to forgive.
My already-small extended family is further diminished. I can no long claim the great grandparents—one of them, a polyglot—on my father’s side. When my mother and aunt die in the same year, I’m without older relatives altogether, aside from my sisters. The family tree I thought I knew, already pruned by divorce, has been hacked to pieces and carted away.
I lose any sense of connectedness with living cousins—people I barely knew anyway, because we all mostly stopped talking when I stopped seeing my father. He refused to explain why we weren’t in contact, leaving them to assume that he was the puzzled victim of some conflict initiated by me and my sisters. Now, through social media, a few of my cousins send tactful messages, saying I’m still “family.” It doesn’t feel that way to me, especially given how little we all interacted for decades, but I am grateful for their kindness.
The biggest loss—and the one I’ve least anticipated—is how deeply sorry I am to have lost my Italian-American heritage. For most of my life, I’ve looked in the mirror and imagined that my calves were Roman calves, my nose an Italian nose, my stature and dark coloring and love of wine and Italian food all explicable, and meaningful, because it connected me to a rich heritage. By the time I find out Dad isn’t my bio-dad, I’ve traveled to Italy twice—the second time to write a novel set there.
Now, that novel and all the emotions attached to it seem distant. But another fictional representation of my family angst takes its place.
This month will mark the publication of the most personal novel I’ve ever written, called Annie and the Wolves. It’s the story of a modern-day historian who finds her life intertwined with that of her subject, Annie Oakley. In both historical and modern storylines, characters struggle to recover from abuse. As it happens, one of America’s great icons, an 1800s sharpshooter who took the world by storm, she was molested too—in this case, by a farm family called “the Wolves” who held her captive when she was between the ages of ten to twelve.
It doesn’t take a psychologist to imagine why I was drawn to that plot.
In my novel, which takes place across a century, characters struggle to remember, to uncover dark family secrets and deal with vengeful desires—all in the hopes of finding a way forward.
My own path includes exactly this: finding a way, through both fiction and nonfiction, to deal with my family’s legacy and my own confused feelings. I’ve been liberated from one connection. But in another way, I feel more chained to my father and his story than ever—unable to shake them off. You’ll notice I still choose to call him “Dad” and “my father.” It’s a choice I’ve made only recently, in part to be more honest with the influence he had on me, from birth at least until age fourteen. Biology isn’t everything. I’ve spent time thinking about his upbringing, wondering why he did what he did and what he, himself, may have suffered.
The man I grew up loving was almost certainly a victim who passed along his damage to others, repeating what was done to him. He wasn’t really a monster, of course. But he was a predator—someone who hunted his prey with cunning.
Regardless of any blood connection, he’s a wolf I’ve had to confront—one who still prowls the dark corners of my mind.Andromeda Romano-Lax is the author of Annie and the Wolves (Soho, Feb. 2, 2021) as well as four other novels. She lives in British Columbia, Canada. You can visit her website and find her on Instagram.
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 “