Gina Cameron was always aware that something in her family wasn’t quite right. Her relationship with her father was volatile—strained and lacking in warmth and closeness. Her mother was critical, controlling, and went to great lengths to point out the ways in which the mother and daughter were different. But Cameron had no idea that for 63 years her mother had been keeping a profoundly disturbing secret.

It wasn’t until Cameron was in her sixties and her mother had died that the secret tumbled out. At a family reunion, her cousin Dan inadvertently dropped a truth bomb in a casual conversation, commenting that Cameron and her sister had different fathers. Her family had always been aware, he said, and had been told not to tell her, but he was certain that by that time she’d have known. She was blindsided by this revelation that, in turn, triggered a childhood memory: an aunt saying, “Louie isn’t Genie’s father.” When she later confronted her mother about what she’d overheard, her mother not only insisted it wasn’t true, she also accused her of being ungrateful, shameful, impertinent. She was ignored for days by her parents and stuffed this experience deep down, only to have it resurface five decades later.

Rattled by her conversation with Dan, Cameron arranged a meeting with her father’s niece Ellen, and got a lead for another piece of the puzzle of her origins while strolling together on the High Line in New York. Ellen called her sister Karen, who in turn phoned Cameron and recalled that they two had met when Cameron was three years old—when Louie had met her mother. And again, a memory arose from deep within her—from the time her father, in a letter, disowned her when she was 42 years old. “You’ve been a thorn in my side since you were three years old,” he wrote. She was sick, he’d said, selfish, hurtful.

Looking back after all those years, it all began to make sense. “Scenes from my past crowded my waking hours,” she writes. “The revelation about my paternity was a new frame for the puzzling, troubled undercurrents I’d always felt in my childhood home. For that, I was grateful.”

Grateful for a reason why she’d been seen as the family’s problem, why she’d been branded bad, a compulsive liar, a stubborn and willful child, why she’d been locked in a closet as a punishment as a child, locked in her room when her parents went out, and locked in a hotel room during a family vacation. That gratitude found expression when, at a family visit, her cousin, Carol, asked if Cameron had felt that she’d been treated differently as a child—something she and other relatives had clearly observed. When Cameron acknowledged those feelings, Carol took her hand and said, “Now you know you weren’t crazy to feel that.”

“I bathed in her words and gesture—a simple acknowledgement of my perceptions, believed as fact, no judgment. Seen, and accepted, I felt more and more at home.”

The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to take shape, but there was no one involved who was still alive and could confirm all the details of what had happened or answer a burning question: Who was her father?

Who’s My Daddy? Exposing the Roots of Family Secrets, is Cameron’s memoir of a journey to find her roots, her identity, her father, and herself. It’s also a retrospective examination of her relationship with her mother—a reassessment made necessary by the discovery of her deception. “Now, in light of the revelations of lies and deception that permeated every aspect of our relationship, I realized my mother had an intimate familiarity and comfort with fabrication and prevarication.”

Cameron began to create a revisionist history of her family—to see the story anew based on new facts and, thus, see herself anew. It’s a well-written, deeply moving story that certainly will resonate with NPEs (not parent expected) and adoptees as well—with anyone who’s sense of self has imploded and who had to recreate, brick by brick, their identity and reestablish their place in their family and their world.

—BKJ

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Gina Cameron is a founding member of San Diego Writers, Ink, a nonprofit organization that offers classes and literary events. She holds a Master of Science in physical therapy from Boston University. After decades as a pediatric physical therapist, Cameron is now retired and enjoys writing, swimming, hiking, and traveling the globe. Her work has been published in

A Year in Ink, Volumes 13 and 17 and Active Voices, Volume 3.  Who’s My Daddy? Exposing the Roots of Family Secrets is her first book. She can be found on Instagram @ginanataliecameron.

Following the success of last year’s event, the second annual DNA Surprise Retreat is set to take place from September 19-22, 2024, at the picturesque Saguaro Lake Ranch outside of Phoenix, AZ. This retreat is designed for those who have experienced life-altering discoveries through consumer DNA tests, providing a supportive and healing community.

The inaugural retreat was met with overwhelmingly positive feedback, with participants finding solace, understanding, and camaraderie among peers who shared similar experiences.

At the 2024 retreat, attendees will benefit from expert-led sessions on topics such as generational trauma, parts work, and betrayal trauma. In addition, the retreat will offer rejuvenating yoga and breathwork sessions led by seasoned facilitators, ensuring a holistic approach to healing.

Co-founder Alexis Hourselt, who faced her own DNA surprise in 2021 upon learning that the man who raised her was not her biological father, expressed the transformative impact of these retreats. “My DNA surprise completely upended my sense of identity,” said Hourselt. “Navigating new family relationships and feeling a profound sense of betrayal was incredibly isolating. But through this community, I found that I was not alone.”

Hourselt co-founded the retreat with Debbie Olson, who discovered in 2019 that her estranged father was alive after being told he had died. “We’re thrilled to continue creating spaces where people can come together, share their stories, and heal,” said Olson.

Hourselt and Olson are committed to continuing this vital support network. “No one expects their world to be turned upside down by a DNA test,” said Hourselt. “It’s essential for people to know they are not alone and that there is a community ready to help.”

For more information and to register for the retreat, visit www.dnasurpriseretreat.com.

By Lezlee Lijenberg

Dear Friend,

We may or may not have ever met but we remain kin. We may not share DNA but we are kin in the sense of sharing a common bond in the discoveries of our histories—the profound feelings of having lost a part of ourselves when we learned our father was not our father, perhaps we were told of a different birthmother or half-sibling popped up on our 23andMe family tree.

We are more alike than you think. We have been lied to and deceived by people that in most cases we held dear and loved unconditionally. These are the same people that pulled the rug out from under us when confronted with the revelations. Some of them denied us of the truth, while others were angry and resentful that the secrets had been revealed. Our stories follow a long gamut of possibilities and outcomes, but we remain in the same family of broken hearts.

In the beginning, many of us do not know where to turn or what to do. Our commonalities grow as we try to determine how to handle the situation. So many questions. How do we address it? How to share the information we learned weighs heavily on our hearts. At times fear takes hold and at other moments anger, tears and confusion replace the ecstatic joy of knowing that craziness did not win.

I do not take our relationship lightly. In fact, it is probably the most serious connection I could ever experience. It is irreplaceable because it is not a relationship of choice but one of necessity and survival. It is a bond created by decisions out of our control. Our relatives will never understand what has evolved between us because whether they want to believe it or not, they connected us without even realizing it.

People want to be a part of something. They want to be included and accepted. We are no different yet, as NPEs, we are facing situations of rejection and inclusion all in the same breath by people that have always been a part of our lives and by complete strangers. This is not a club membership we aspired to being a part of throughout the years. It is not a group anticipated to be an answer to hold us up when we are down, to pick us up when we falter or to celebrate with us when another cog in the wheel falls into place.

It is a club of united human beings coming together to share our experiences and through the accumulation of stories we help one another heal. Today I reach out my hand to you. Let’s embrace the moment because it can pass all too soon. For the moments of hurt shift and then, when we least expect it, return again. We have a sense of false security when we think we have a handle on all of the secrets. Then in a flash, the past hits us fully in the face and a new and strange feeling must be contended with one more time. Each feeling is different, and it appears there are no right or wrong answers. All we seem to have is ourselves to face the consequences and the results of the actions of the past.

However, I am here to tell you my friend, you are not alone, and you never have to choose a path of exclusion. You have thousands of NPE family members just like me that are here for you. We are a shoulder to lean on and a heart to listen. Most of us are willing and able to stand by you until the storms subside. We remain a life raft in the turbulent waves of your discovery and if you are drowning we will row you to shore.

With love and the heart of a lioness,

Lezlee

Lezlee Liljenberg is an award-winning business owner, entrepreneur, and author on a mission to help others in the discovery of their true identities, their biological families, and dealing with DNA surprises. Previously, she was a successful commercial real estate broker, and in 2004 she started her own insurance agency, which she sold 18 years later and formed Liljenberg Insurance Expert Witness, where she’s a consultant and expert witness for insurance cases. Liljenberg holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism/public relations and a master’s degree in political science/public administration from the University of Texas at Arlington. She’s written numerous articles and two books, including If You Only Knew: Navigating DNA Surprises and the NPE World.

Follow her blog and stay in touch at www.iamlezlee.com. She’d love to hear your story and for you to become part of her family.

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By Michelle Talsma Everson

On a red eye flight home from visiting my best friend, my 13-year-old son’s sleepy head on my shoulder, I message my aunt to ask if we can visit her beach house this summer. She says yes enthusiastically, and we check on dates. I message my little brothers’ mom to say hi and catch up. I make a note to message my sister. To another aunt, one who helped raise me, I send photos of my sleepy teen. It all feels so normal, and for that I am grateful.

Recently I told a friend about two aunts who helped save me. One, my mother’s sister who took me in when I was 17. Another, my biological dad’s sister, who did very much the same almost 20 years later. In between, I was honored to be mentored and raised by other amazing women. I count my blessings and they are many.

Two years ago, a surprise DNA discovery rocked my world. I was raised knowing my dad had other children out in the world—and more than a decade after his passing, I spit in a tube for two at-home DNA tests in hopes of finding these long list siblings. What I found instead was that my dad, who had passed in 2010, wasn’t my biological father. My biological father was very much alive and living in the city where I was born.

What ensued over the last two years brought me to the brink of insanity and back again. The best way to describe it is to imagine feeling all human emotions possible all at once. Grief, pain, betrayal, curiosity—the works. Overnight, I went from being an only child to having multiple half siblings. My ethic identity changed too—I was raised identifying as a Mexican American, and, it turns out, I’m half Jewish. An identity crisis followed. I’m an NPE (not-parent expected), and I needed to find out where that fits into who I am as a person.

A writer, I published multiple local and national articles about the experience—my own and those of others in my same boat. An explorer who wanted closure of some sort, I met multiple new family members as I and my son darted around the country.

The big question—have I met my bio dad, as I call him? Yes, once, in November 2022 for a few hours when he was in my hometown. It was a surreal experience that’s hard to put into words. He acknowledges me—which is what I needed for my heart to calm down and the shame to fade—and we keep in casual touch.

Gratitude and growth are my mottos these days. Of course, there’s the occasional ache and pain when I see photos of people I’m related to and haven’t met; but overall, these are the days I’ve waited for. I’m finally (mostly) on the other side of the grief associated with this.

There were some dark, dark days though. A recent study about the mental and emotional health impacts of being an NPE shows that I’m not alone in suffering a variety of mental health and emotional issues. Common feelings include everything imaginable—as I’ve stated, it’s like feeling all the spectrum of human emotion at once. Loss. Betrayal. Grief. Anger. Excitement. All the feelings. There were sleepless nights, passive suicidal ideations, gratitude for the kindness of strangers and loved ones, realizations that it was okay to do what was best for me and my son—even if others disagreed.

For those of you at the beginning of a surprise DNA discovery journey, know that you are not alone and that help and support is out there. There are dark days, but there’s also hope. For those supporting loved ones on this journey, remember there’s no timeline to grief and no two journeys are alike. One day your loved one may be on top of the world, the next they may not be able to get out of bed. And both days are okay. Also, if you’ve been recently contacted by someone with a surprise DNA discovery, I implore you to choose empathy. We did not choose this, just as you likely didn’t, so please remember we’re doing our best.

As for myself, while everyone’s journey is different, I’m so grateful for each rainbow after each storm and for those who supported me through this particular storm. I hope to choose empathy always, and to always pay forward what I have learned.

Michelle Talsma Everson is a journalist, editor, public relations pro, and storyteller from Phoenix, Arizona. She discovered she was an NPE (not parent expected) in March 2021, and since then has been navigating how to best blend her writing and NPE discovery to be a voice and provide resources for those affected by surprise DNA discoveries. Read about her NPE journey on Scary Mommy and the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix. She’s also written about the topic for Next Avenue. To learn more about her career outside of her NPE discovery, connect with her on LinkedIn, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter.

By Gwen Lee

I settled into the chair, ready for the stylist to begin my long-overdue haircut. I’ve found that there are varying degrees of chattiness among stylists. While I tend to be fairly quiet, if the person who’s going to hold me captive in their chair for the next hour or so starts an interesting conversation, I’ll gladly participate.

Salon chair conversations are usually innocuous enough. On this particular day, the conversation took a different turn. The stylist, Sophia, launched into a story about how she was angry with her ex-husband because he was trying to convince her daughter that she was not his biological daughter. There was a matter of the daughter’s hair coloring (that had to be how we got on this topic) not matching the ex-husband’s color. Sophia was considering having her daughter take a DNA test to prove that her ex-husband was indeed her daughter’s biological father.

I didn’t, and would never, interfere in anyone else’s family drama, especially that of a virtual stranger. Otherwise, I might have been inclined to tell her to tread carefully. Warning bells starting going off and red lights started flashing in my head. It had been about a year since I’d learned I was an NPE (not parent expected).

My discovery that the man whose name was on my birth certificate was not actually my biological father came, like so many others, after I took an Ancestry DNA test in 2017, purely out of curiosity about my ethnicity. When I started looking at DNA matches, I noticed a lot of names I recognized as maternal relatives. I didn’t know a lot about my dad’s family. He and my mother had divorced when I was 5 years old. He moved across country, and I’d only had a handful of visits with him since. But I knew enough to know that I didn’t see anyone from his family on my list of matches. There were also a lot of names I didn’t recognize at all. It didn’t take me very long to figure out what had occurred. It didn’t seem impossible to me. After all, years ago, my sister discovered she was an NPE. That was before Ancestry DNA tests. Someone gave her a hint and she used the services of a private detective, who also happened to be our brother, to find her biological father. After researching, talking to some cousins on my paternal side, and using the services of a search angel, I was able to determine who my bio father was. I then asked one of his daughters to test on Ancestry. The result confirmed she was my half-sister.

By the time I made my discovery, my mother and my bio father had both passed away. Consequently, I’m left with many unanswered questions. I’ve come to accept that there are many details around my conception that I will never know.

I wrestled with the decision about whether I should talk to my birth certificate father about this situation. That brings me to one of the dilemmas faced by many NPEs at some point after the world turns itself back upright again after they make their discoveries. To whom are they going to tell their stories?

We all have to make decisions about whom we can trust with our stories. It’s not really a matter of comfort, because I doubt that many of us feel “comfortable” telling our stories to anyone. It’s not a situation that engenders comfort. But I know from listening to many NPE stories that many of us do tell someone, and often we feel better for having shared.

There is no NPE Discoveries for Dummies manual. We’re left on our own to decide how to handle these matters, and telling or not telling is a decision that we have to make on our own. Even for those NPEs who are lucky enough to have therapists or counselors helping them navigate their journeys, and while there are likely some professional opinions, I believe it has to be the decision of the NPE.

So many circumstances go into the decision about whether NPEs will share their stories with someone else, and they are all very personal. We talk about how there a few basic premises behind NPE discoveries—the things that put us all in the same boat. Yet, everyone’s story has many individual aspects. It’s the same with the tell-or-don’t-tell decision. Everyone has very personal issues that cause them to grapple with this decision.

Decisions range from I’m not telling anyone because it’s no one’s business but mine to I’m very open about it—I even told the grocery store clerk. Many decisions fall somewhere between the two. The vibe I got from Sophia, my stylist, is that she’d be one of the more open story tellers.

Many NPEs tell some, but not all, family members and a few select friends. Some tell most of the family, leaving only a few relatives in the dark. Based on my own decision-making processes and on other NPE stories I have heard, there are a variety of motivations behind some of these decisions.

Some people only tell their stories to the people they think might be interested. I think we all have been in a situation where we start to talk about DNA or NPEs and the eyes of the person we’re talking to glaze over. That’s not someone I’d be likely to get into a deep NPE discussion with. Some people are interested initially, but if we keep bringing the subject up to them a year or two later, we sense they are losing interest. Most of us realize that our stories aren’t as impactful to anyone else as they are to us.

Some NPEs feel they need to tell their stories to those affected by their discoveries. This is especially true if they happen to be on the same branch of the family tree—for example, if the discovery directly affects the NPEs children and grandchildren. I knew right away that I wanted to tell my sons and daughters-in-law. It directly affected them as well. I also told my brothers and my sister, even though they are half-siblings. My discovery didn’t directly affect them, but it may have helped clarify some of the family history as it pertained to our mother. I think I told them more out of a need to share with someone who cared about me—someone who might understand, or at least try to understand, what I was going through. Of course, I also told my husband. He’s been supportive but really has little interest in the whole discovery process, so  I don’t discuss it with him on an ongoing basis.

The people I do continue discussing it with are those in the NPE support group that I attend once a week. This group has been my salvation. I am able to share with others who are all in that same proverbial rocky boat I’m in. We all have stories that differ in ways, some slightly, some considerably, but we understand each other and support each other and take every opportunity to lift each other up. I’m incredibly thankful to have been referred to this group by a fellow NPE.

Some of us who have been open with some of our family members have one or several people we’ve decided not to tell. Again, the reasons for these decisions vary widely. We might feel these people will not understand and will just find the whole issue somewhat shameful; they might  insinuate that we should just “put it away.”

Sometimes, when we choose not to tell certain people, it’s out of an effort to protect our mothers’ reputations. It may have come to light that our NPE status resulted from extra-marital affairs, and we don’t want our moms to be seen in a bad light, so we choose not to tell our more judgmental relatives. And other times we don’t feel that a particular person would be able to handle this complicated information.

There are also instances in which we believe that a person will take our stories, throw them into a mixing bowl, stir it around, and bake up big family dramas. They might invest all of their negative energy into the situation, possibly with no regard to how it will affect the NPEs.

Another scenario involves NPEs wanting to spare certain people the heartbreak that the knowledge would bring them. They may want to spare a mother who didn’t know who the father of her child was and who let the birth certificate father believe the child was his; or a mother who may have conceived after a sexual assault; or a birth certificate father who had no idea he was not the biological father; or one who knew and chose to keep the secret and raise the child lovingly as his own. Suddenly we have the truth in our hands but we want to spare our loving fathers the sadness it would bring them. In these scenarios, the NPEs consider it a gift to keep this information from their parents. Others say the parent has a right to know. Sometimes the parents’ health and age may play part in the decision, for example with an NPE deciding that their parent is too close to the end of their life to needlessly lay this information in their lap.

I believe all of these scenarios in which discovery information is withheld, just like many of the other issues that rise up along the pathways of our NPE journeys, are fluid. It may take months, even years, but an NPE might rethink their decision to not tell a certain person. It’s a personal decision.

As part of my journey, I chose not to tell my birth certificate dad. By the time I made my discovery, he was already near the end of his life and suffering with dementia. I simply couldn’t justify bringing this information to him, if he’d been able to understand it.

I’m hoping that at least one person will see this and know that they are not alone in some of these feelings, doubts, and fears they wrestle with while deciding to tell or not tell. If that’s you, you can take comfort in knowing that many of us are in that same rocky boat. There are no right or wrong decisions for everyone. Ultimately, these choices are yours alone to make.  Give yourself time and some grace and know you will make the right decisions for you.

Gwen Lee is a mother and grandmother of four. She and her husband, Don, have been married for 51 years. Lee has lived in Southern California her whole life, and she retired in 2020 from her profession as an administrative assistant. She enjoys reading and crafting, particularly crochet. Her email address is gwenlee84@gmail.com.

By Kara Rubinstein Deyerin

People with misattributed parentage, DNA surprises, and unknown origins have a lot in common. Many of us learn about being misattributed because we are byproducts of the direct-to-consumer DNA testing phenomenon. We bought into the commercial enticing us to learn more about our roots, or perhaps we were gifted a test, and then we received the shock of our lives—we are not genetically related to one or both of our parents. Some of us grow up knowing we have a different genetic parent(s) out there, somewhere, but aren’t interested in knowing them. However we get there, when we start the process of reunion, we all end up in a very similar emotional space.

One thing I continue to hear as I speak with people experiencing these new discoveries is “I felt all alone.” I can completely identify with this sentiment. While each of our stories is unique,  many common themes flow through them. We are not alone. United we can help each other heal. We can educate others about how deeply we are impacted. And we can elevate each other’s voices to change societal perceptions and laws to reflect our most basic right to know who we are.

Untangling Our Roots is the first-ever summit to promote these principles and bring together adoptees, the donor-conceived, people with an NPE, their significant others, raising and genetic family, and the professionals who assist our communities–an event sponsored by Right to Know and the National Association of Adoptees and Parents.

The summit will take place in Louisville, Kentucky, March 30-April 1. Tickets include breakfast, drinks, lunch, and snacks Friday and Saturday, all entertainment, tai chi and yoga moments, six different presenter sessions, a keynote speaker panel, and a special plenary speaker as well as the chance to meet many authors, podcasters, and therapists. There’s nothing like being in a room filled with people who just get it.

The event kicks off Thursday night at 5:00pm with registration, open mic, and Cory Goodrich’s show Folksong about her NPE. It’s a musical 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. A five-time Jeff nominee, Goodrich is an award-winning actress who’s performed on stages across the country and has been seen on many television shows and commercials.

Starting Friday morning, Pekitta Tynes will be the master of ceremonies. Tynes is a professional comedienne, an adoptee, a foster child, a foundling, and the author of the book titled Thank God I Was Adopted ‘Cause DNA Is No Joke! She uses humor to share her search experience and her journey to finding her biological connection despite life’s obstacles. The first session will be a keynote panel with Astrid Castro, an adoptee who started Adoption Mosaic; Christine Jacobsen, an NPE and author of Dancing Around the Truth; and Chrysta Bilton, a DCP who wrote Normal Family. discussing family dynamics with NPE Leeanne R Hay author of NPE: A Story Guide moderating.

There are three session periods: a speaker workshop, speaker panel, and creative & therapeutic workshop with each session having five options. One session will be specifically for significant others because a DNA discovery is an emotional time for everyone. The day ends with comedy from Tynes and Laura High, a DCP, New York actor, and comedian.

Friday evening entertainment will feature Brian Stanton’s @ghostkingdom at 8pm. Stanton is a Los Angeles-based stage actor best known for his original solo play Blank, the true story of his adoption and search for identity. @ghostkingdom, his most recent work, has been screened at film festivals as well as for adoption support and at educational conferences. The Love International Film Festival honored Stanton with Best Screenwriter and Best Actor awards.

Saturday morning’s plenary speaker will be Paul Joseph Fronczak, whose foundling story touches on what many with misattributed parentage feel. “Ever since I was a child, I had a feeling I was someone else.” There will again be three session periods: a speaker workshop, speaker panel, and creative & therapeutic workshop with each session having five options. A full agenda is available here. And the summit will close with an to reflect and rejuvenate with Amber Jimerson, Lesli Johnson, MFT, and Ridghaus.

There will be a quiet room where therapists will volunteer to help attendees should a topic, discussion, or comment raise uncomfortable or difficult feelings or memories.

See the full agenda here.

Tickets are $279 until February 14, when they will increase to $319. Significant other tickets for Thursday evening and all-day Friday are $119 until February 14 and will increase to $139. NBCC credit available for therapist attendees from an online class recorded from summit sessions. For questions or further information, write to info@UntanglingOurRoots.org and visit the summit website.

Kara Rubinstein Deyerin is a non-practicing attorney with an LLM in Taxation. In January 2018, she wanted to see where in Africa her father’s family came from. Her direct-to-consumer DNA test revealed she was 50% something, but she had zero African DNA. This meant the man on her birth certificate couldn’t possibly be her genetic father. She lost her bi-racial identity with the click of a mouse.Deyerin discovered she was 50% Ashkenazi Jew. The DNA pandora’s box she opened led to an identity crisis. Lack of resources, advocacy, and access to support led her to co-found Right to Know. She’s a passionate advocate for genetic identity rights.

By Michelle Talsma Everson

“It has been an honor to raise you…”

She met me when I was 21 and broken. Now, a lifetime later, I’m 36, and she’s sitting across from me at Disneyland, pausing to make sure I understood that.

Also a mom, I understand the honor that comes with motherhood. Still very much broken but actively seeking healing now, I don’t comprehend how that honor can be applied to me. It’s like I understand it theoretically, but my heart is working on accepting it. One day at a time.

I am an NPE (non-parent expected). The dad who raised me isn’t my biological dad, and the man who is isn’t interested in taking up space in that realm. It’s like someone being raised from the dead and dying again. Not many people mourn the same relationship twice.

Even before I knew I was an NPE, I was the daughter of alcoholics, addicts, two people battling undiagnosed mental illnesses. They died when I was 22 and 24. I had their grandson in between. I was never loved how a child should be loved. Love is conditional, of course, dependent on how you act, who you pretend to be, and the moment itself. My parents tried—likely doing the best they could with the tools they had—but betrayal, abuse, and diagnoses of anxiety, depression, PTSD, and more tell a story that’s not pleasant to hear. “Sometimes we are the casualty in someone else’s battles against themselves” is my favorite quote from the internet.

“It has been an honor to raise you…”

She met me when I was 21 and broken. Now, a lifetime later, I’m 36, and she’s sitting across from me at Disneyland, pausing to make sure I understood that.

I refer to her as my bonus mom in my narratives. Mother-in-law no longer fits, and the guilt from that is something I battle. I want to apologize to her that her son and I couldn’t make a marriage work. I want to ask her forgiveness for me being so much. So much trauma. So much talking. So much anxiety. So. Much. Everything.

Instead, she simply says, “I love you for you, unconditionally.”

The thought floors me.

I love my own son unconditionally. There’s nothing he could do that would change that. So, in theory I understand, but my heart has a hard time believing that could be applied to me.

I often think of my own parents, dead now nearly 14 and 12 years, and I wonder if they’d still love me knowing that I found out about a long-held secret and—to heal—I share it with the world. I know they wouldn’t approve of how I live my life in that aspect and so many others. I hope they’d still be honored to have raised me. I’m not so sure.

But my bonus mom shows it through action, not just words. We have boundaries, but she knows my secrets, she includes me, she stands in the grey between being my ex’s mom but also being my friend, advocate, and bonus mom. She encourages us to be the best people we can be and to do what’s best for her grandson. Beyond that, she simply holds space and is there when we need her. She doesn’t play favorites between her son and me. It’s a balance not many manage.

 “It has been an honor to raise you…”

She met me when I was 21 and broken. Now, a lifetime later, I’m 36, and she’s sitting across from me at Disneyland, pausing to make sure I understood that.

It has been an honor to be raised by you. It has been a blessing to see you be a grandma to my son. It is a privilege to share your last name. I want to say thank you for loving me. For raising me. For stepping in when my mom couldn’t. For holding space for your own son and the woman who is raising his son. I appreciate it more than words can express. I tell your grandson that God gave me you because he saw I needed a mom. Instead of thanking you with words, I will do it with actions. I promise that your grandson will only know the unconditional love that you have shown me. Not only in words, but in action.

Because it is an honor to raise him, as it has been an honor to be raised by you.

Michelle Talsma Everson is an independent journalist, editor, and storyteller from Phoenix, Arizona. She discovered she was an NPE (not parent expected) in March 2021 and, since then, has been navigating how to best blend her writing and NPE discovery to be a voice and provide resources for those affected by surprise DNA discoveries. Read about her NPE journey on Scary Mommy and the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix. She’s also written about the topic for Next Avenue. To learn more about her career outside of her NPE discovery, connect with her on LinkedIn, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter.

Please tell us a little about yourself—what was your life like before your DNA surprise?

I was born in 1965 in a state where I’ve never lived—Iowa. Our home was across the river in Illinois, but our doctor and hospital were in Iowa. I have lived in Los Angeles for over half my life, since I was 27. My wife and I are small business owners in the entertainment industry, and we are almost empty nesters. Our youngest will be starting his senior year of college in the fall.

Can you summarize as much as you’re comfortable sharing of your personal story of when and how your DNA surprise came about?

Rumors have swirled around my family in regard to my older sister for decades. She and I grew up thinking we were full siblings. Every ten years or so, someone would get drunk and angry and bring up that she wasn’t my father’s child. Then a few years ago, she found out it was true. My parents finally came clean. My mom was already pregnant when she met my dad. He was fully aware and agreed to raise her as his own. Two years later I was born.

That sister spent over a year and a half looking for her bio father but to no avail. I asked her if she needed help. I also did a 23andMe test so we we’d have something to compare. But when I received my results, I discovered I had two half-sisters I never even knew existed. And in fact there weren’t just two, there were four. It turns out my mother had a one-night stand with their father in 1965. My new siblings welcomed me into their family with open arms. My bio dad drank himself to death in 2010, which in a way has actually made the bond with my new siblings stronger. In telling me stories about him so I could know who he was, they realized there was a lot of good about their father that they hadn’t been focusing on. And I fit in with them way more than I ever did my in original family.

How are you absorbing or exploring this knowledge?

As my wife says, I am “all NPE all the time.” I dove in deep and read a lot about NPEs. In the beginning, I devoured all the NPE podcasts and in doing so found a way to place my feelings into perspective. Someone once told me there are two types of people in this world, those who want to find out what’s behind that closed door and those who don’t. I especially think this is true in our NPE world. I am definitely one who wants—actually who needs—to know what’s behind that door. So eventually I started my own podcast.

What aspect of your own experience was most difficult for you?

My dad grew up on a farm in NE Iowa. He’s 100% Scandinavian. When I was 16, I saw a family tree in which someone traced our Norwegian side of the family back to a couple who came over on the boat from Norway in 1855. I was hooked. I dove into my Norwegian heritage. (No one else in my family was into it like I was.) I’ve gone to Norway twice, and I found the farm that my ancestors sold to come to America. For Christmas dinners, I make Norwegian meatballs. I have a Norwegian flag on my office wall. On the day I found my new half-sisters, I also found out I’m not Norwegian at all. It’s heartbreaking for me.

What helped you most?

Listening to NPE podcasts, especially NPE Stories, helped me process my feelings a lot during those first few months after my discovery. Hearing others talk about the same feelings I was having was huge. And finding out I wasn’t alone took so much of the shame away. Severance Magazine and certain Facebook groups (not the big one) help in that regard too. I was in an NPE group therapy for three months or so. That helped me quite a bit. Nowadays, I also see an NPE therapist (she is an NPE) and I am seeing a lot of benefits from that.

How and why did you decide to do a podcast?

I’m in the film business, have produced and edited a feature length documentary, and have been working on my own documentary for six years. (It’s about kids who grew up in a cult.) It’s a labor of love for sure. So right after I discovered my dad wasn’t my dad, I knew I wanted to do something creative. Matter of fact, my steps in finding out about the NPE world were:

• I googled “my dad isn’t my dad” and somewhere amongst those results I found the term NPE
• I thought I wanted to do an NPE podcast, so I googled NPE podcast to see if there were any being produced already. That’s how I found Lily’s podcast, NPE Stories.
• And actually, as a side note, I emailed one of Lily’s guests, and she’s the one who told me about the Facebook groups.

There are a number of NPE/DNA surprise podcasts—how do you describe yours?

I’ve been a huge fan of This American Life for decades, long before the word podcast ever existed. I am heavily influenced by that show/podcast. But I try to make every episode like a documentary. I really like to use archival footage when it’s available and appropriate. I add music to enhance the listening experience. I often have more than one person telling a story. Whereas some podcast creators will have an NPE telling their story, I want their mom and their brother to tell their side of the story too. I think there’s room for all of our podcasts because they are different with different styles and content, which is good for the listener to have plenty of variety. I also make sure the audio is high quality. I often have my guests purchase microphones. I can’t handle bad audio.

What’s been the reaction? What are you hearing from listeners?

So far, people have reacted positively. I had contacted an NPE I found on Severance actually and asked him to be a guest. I sent him episode two of my podcast, which is about me and my four new half-sisters. He loved it and said, “Have you ever heard of This American Life? Your podcast reminds me of that.” I told him thanks and that you could not bestow a better compliment on me than that. I felt like a million bucks.

What if anything has most surprised you in the course of interviewing?

How often I bump my table and microphone has surprised me a quite a bit. Also, I think everyone I have interviewed, other than the “Unsolved Murder” episode, has cried, which I think is a wonderful thing. I wish there wasn’t a need for them to cry but I am grateful that they feel safe enough with me to let it out. It’s powerful.

Why do you think it’s important for people to share their stories? Why is it important for the storyteller and why is it important for others who receive the stories?

As I alluded to earlier, listening to others tell their story has helped me process my feelings better than anything else. It’s magic. And I think someone telling their story to someone who has been in their shoes is magic squared. There’s this old song I recall from my teenage years and the lyric was something like…“what would touch you deeper, that tears that fall from eyes that only cry, would it touch you deeper, tears that fall from eyes that know why?”

When we tell our stories it helps us heal. Full stop.

Based on the podcasts you’ve done so far, what would you say are the most universally difficult aspects of the experience?

Finding out your dad isn’t your dad hurts. It just does. And it changes lives, one way or another.

A heard someone in a self-help group say, “If it ain’t one thing, it’s your mother.” As NPEs, I think most of our relationships with our mothers is, at best, complicated. The reasons for that are both obvious and complex. And the severity is, of course, different amongst us, but all in all this seems to be the most difficult aspect. I could go on and on about why I think that but a couple things that stand out are that the majority of NPE people I’ve heard interviewed say their moms have narcissistic traits. I don’t know if that’s because those are the type of women who are more likely to have an NPE or if it’s that children of narcissist mothers are more apt to go on podcasts and tell their stories. Either way, it seems to be a thing.

On episode four of my podcast I interviewed four women who are pillars in our NPE community: Eve Sturges, a therapist and host of the podcast Everything’s Relative with Eve Sturges; Erin Cosentino, co-founder of Hiraeth Hope & Healing and founder of NPE Only Facebook group; Lily Wood, host of NPE Stories; and Gina Daniels, PhD, of Graystone Mental Health and Wellness Group. I asked them all four questions, one of which was, “what is your relationship like with your mother nowadays?” Their answers were all of course different but so amazing and complex and just full of pain and hope all rolled into one. They took the discussion to another level.

But also I have to say that as a society, we have such double standards when it comes to women cheating vs men cheating. I am not condoning anyone cheating but I think that creates a lot of shame in our mothers. And shame is a horrible thing, so I try to have compassion. I have forgiven my mother. Her “mistake” 56 years ago created a pretty amazing person. I’ve forgiven her for her past. However, her reluctance to discuss it today really puts a damper on our relationship.

Are you looking for participants and if so, how should they contact you??

I’m always on the hunt for good stories, especially those with a twist. I’m drawn to stories where I can weave multiple interviews from different people into one narrative. If someone has old footage/recordings of their bio dad that’s pertinent to their story, by all means, get in touch with me. Also, I often look for people who don’t even know what NPE means. My most popular episode by far is about a woman who was switched at birth in 1958. She’s known for over 20 years but did not know what an NPE was until I contacted her. Since then she’s been on the Facebook group Togetherness Heals getting support and giving support to others. That fact alone, that I was able to help her find us, the NPE community, has been one of the amazing outcomes of doing my podcast.

If someone thinks their story would be a good fit, the best way to contact me is on Instagram. I don’t really have an email set up yet…who needs another email. And if you aren’t on the gram…ask your kid to send me a message on your behalf.

The Faces of NPE Project was created by Carmen Dixon to help NPEs (not parent expected) know they’re not alone and to bring awareness to individuals outside the community. While reflecting on her own NPE journey, she remembered that it took time at first to find information and support. She did ultimately find many support communities and great resources, each with something different to offer. Now, she’s brought something new into the mix—The Faces of NPE Project.

The idea, she says, is simple. The project amasses images of the faces of NPEs. “Every year, we’ll keep adding new submissions to the existing project, and as the number of faces get added, eventually viewers won’t see specific individual portraits but just a sea of faces—and that’s the point, to emphasize how many NPEs exist worldwide.” The images, Dixon says, will be released yearly in June through social media as a public shareable tool that can be used to help generate awareness.

If you would like to be a part of this project, send your photo submission to facesofnpeproject@outlook.com.

Photos submitted between June 24, 2022 and May 14, 2023 will appear in 2023. Find the project on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

By Eve Sturges

 

NPE: Non-Paternal Event 

(noun) A genealogical term used to describe the disconnect that occurs in familial lineage when a person, as an adult, discovers at least one parent is not biologically related.

(noun) a qualifying term used by people who have experienced the unexpected discovery of a genealogical disconnect between themselves and at least one parent. As in: “When I found out my parents used a sperm donor, I realized I am an NPE.” 

MPE: Misattributed Parentage Event 

A social term used to describe the myriad DNA-discoveries that can occur, including late-discovery adoption, donor conception, and non-paternal event. As in: “I found out that as a teenager I had fathered a child; when this person reached out to me, I realized I am a part of the MPE community.” 

Genetic Mirroring

A term or phrase used to describe the powerful experience of seeing similar physical traits in a relative. “Without genetic mirroring, I’ll never understand where my green eyes came from.” 

Facebook 

(noun) Modern society’s downfall. See also ‘social media,” “Twitter,” “Instagram,” “Discord.”

 

It was a lovely photo, an innocuous post. A group of dark-haired adults sitting around a table, smiling at the camera, golden hour sunset glowing from a side door. Colorful Fiesta pottery suggests a delicious meal is imminent. Wood side-paneling screams “Montana cabin,” and I swear there are golden-retriever puppies asleep on the floor. 

“It’s a truly amazing feeling when I can see all my siblings at one time again. The nostalgia hits hard and the old and new memories made are truly a blessing.” 

For a split-second, it’s no big deal. I scroll social media quickly these days, tired of its mundanity, confused by the chaos, embarrassed to be addicted to it anyway. I stop at this one, caught off guard by the golden hues. My heart leaps into my throat, and my breath quickens. I feel angry and sad at the same time. I think I am being ridiculous and try to move along to more important posts like parenting memes and TikTok tips. But my thumb is out of my control, bringing the handsome family back to me again and again. 

They are my handsome family; I was not invited to dinner. 

I do what any responsible person with feelings does in 2022: I post about it in a Facebook support group for MPEs. I know it’s the only place I will be understood, and I am right. The community love-wraps me in digital hugs immediately. Emojis rain down in solidarity. When I read the comment from a friend with rainbow hair, “wrapping you in my arms,” I cry harder. 

The only unusual detail about my non-paternal event is that my biological father reached out to me; typically it’s the offspring who deliver the news to unsuspecting parents, most often after a mail-in DNA kit offers unexpected results. But when I was 38 years old, a man named Peter called and said, “We’ve been waiting for you to find us!” “Us” included five new siblings. I had always wanted siblings. 

Let me start over. 

I grew up with three siblings and married parents. My parents are still married, despite the phone call that revealed I was actually the product of an affair they’d hidden long ago, hoping to forget. They met in high school and are determined to stay together forever. In a complicated and heartbreaking state of affairs between my family and a government foster system, one of my sisters left our home at age 12 and later died from medical complications resulting from her Down syndrome. My other sister suffers from myriad mental and psychological challenges that keep her functioning like a highly anxious 6-year-old. I have a brother, too, and it isn’t that we don’t get along. We do, it’s fine. But that seems to be as good as it will ever get: fine. Somehow, the three-year age difference between us makes an endless sea of different childhood experiences, and we have very little in common. It seems as good a place as any to mention that they—my brother, sister, and parents–all have blue eyes. My dark features were just minor details, explained away with shrugs and vague ancestry references, a song and dance familiar to many of us in this special club.

So, yes, I have siblings. I have an entire family, intact. But this photograph staring at me from Facebook? We’ve never had a photo like that. Congenial, familial, comfortable. Everyone at that dinner table in Montana has brown eyes. My dark, thick eyebrows were MADE to be with those people. They are my people. I am their people. 

And yet … is that true? As a psychotherapist, I take my clients through an exercise called “feelings are not facts.” I first learned it from a mentor when I was in my twenties, and I learned about it again while studying cognitive behavioral therapy in graduate school. A lot of emotional experiences aren’t based on the actual world around us, and it can be helpful to check one against the other. 

My biological father died shortly after contacting me. He turned my whole existence upside down and then left me holding the pieces. The truth will set you free, but the truth will fuck everything up, too. With my identity shattered, the relationship with my parents fractured, my world spinning, I finally connected with a few of these brothers and sisters on Facebook in early 2020. Three were receptive, two were enthusiastic. The pandemic prevented in-person meetings, but so did the stress of all the challenges that came with it in our everyday lives: lockdowns, mask mandates, toilet paper shortages, disastrous testing centers, grounded flights, zoom schooling, doom scrolling, and life evolving around us faster than we could keep up. I have three children and a private therapy practice that I run from home. Oh, and a podcast. How and when was I supposed to connect with these siblings, and where would we even start? 

I can hear my mentor’s voice in my head, and I can see myself with clients: feelings are not facts. I let myself cry, and I also start to list my feelings out loud: I feel like I would fit in at that dinner. I feel like it would be the sibling connection I’ve always craved, and they’ve left me out on purpose. I feel like we would all know each other in an unspoken understanding about having dark, thick eyebrows. If I were at that dinner, we could finally explore the millions of questions we have about each other, our father, and who we each are as his individual offspring. We would probably stay up all night and take another beautiful photograph with the sweet light of dawn coming in from the other direction. I take a minute to scream into a pillow about the maddening powerlessness of it all. 

There’s nothing left except the facts: If Facebook is any kind of evidence, I actually would not fit in with these people. We have extremely disparate opinions, lifestyles, values. They’ve made little effort toward me, but I haven’t done much better. The truth is that I don’t believe I was left out on purpose; I wasn’t even a consideration. It’s still an idea to chew on, but it’s different than an intentional snub nonetheless. The fact is that more than one sibling has suggested to me, in our brief message exchanges, that there are brewing tensions in the family, and they have their own complicated history; it is unlikely that the golden hour glow stayed for long. 

The fact is that I am often lonely in post-ish pandemic Los Angeles. I miss the ease of companionship and get-togethers, and we’re all exhausted by Zoom. Transition fatigue is real, and I’m unsure how to transition into six or seven new sibling relationships while we’re all navigating everything else. The fact is that I love dinner parties, and I’ve always wanted Fiesta tableware. The fact is that I am scared I’ll offend or frighten them with my millions of questions. The fact is that there’s a lot I don’t know about every aspect of this complex situation, and that is the hardest obstacle of all. 

The fact is that there are, actually, no dogs in the photograph at all. 

I’ve adapted the “feelings are not facts” exercise for and with my clients and added a second tier—the Serenity Prayer. This isn’t from my mentor or CBT therapy. Originally written by a theologian in 1933, it’s famously known as a foundational tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous. (No one reinvents the wheel.)

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 

The courage to change the things I can, 

And the wisdom to know the difference. 

The fact is that despite not having an idyllic relationship with the siblings I grew up with, I do indeed have a family that extends to many aunts and uncles and cousins who love me. We don’t have a cabin in Montana, but we have taken plenty of photographs over the years. A recent reunion was in Idaho, and I don’t remember feeling lonely or unsure about the definition of “family” on those days. I can’t control this picture on Facebook that made me cry, but I can contact my cousin, Jesse, who always brings the best camera. 

“Hey, didn’t we take some group shots on the beach? I’d love a copy please!” I shoot off using a family thread in WhatsApp. Others chime in: My cousin Mariah in Ethiopia also wants a copy; my aunt Ginny in Portland was wondering about it just the other day! Within minutes, a new photograph dominates my screen. We don’t all have matching eyebrows, and there isn’t a golden glow because it was overcast that day, but everyone is smiling. I remember that we are a supportive, fun group despite various challenges over the years. I consider the differences between us, and the family history, and remember that a photograph only captures a single moment, and a photograph doesn’t tell the whole story. 

I write a second message, this time to a half-brother in Wyoming. He posted the dinner party picture that started it all. Our relationship, thus far, is Facebook acceptance only. The courage to change the things I can. “Hey! I saw that family picture at your mom’s house. It looked so nice and fun. I hope you’re well. Now that COVID seems to be fading, maybe I can finally meet y’all one day soon.”  It’s met with silence, but I know I did my part. 

24-hours later, a message rolls in. “That’d be awesome. Sorry, I was at the gym.” 

A few weeks later and we’re still exchanging small notes back and forth, some kind of awkward attempt at conversation and getting to know one another. I messaged a half-sister too, and she wrote back about a recent move to Florida and with sweet questions about my own family. I feel less forgotten, or ignored. I’m holding back on the really big questions, but it feels like we’re closer to a dinner party than we were before. That’s something. 

I’m reaching out to my people here, too, the ones I consider my Los Angeles family, instead of feeling sorry for my lonely butt and waiting by the phone. I’m working on gratitude for the life I have, instead of wondering about the life I could have had if every single thing was different. I am allowing myself to feel my feelings, but I am trying to remember to check them against the facts, too. Eve Sturges is a writer and licensed therapist in Los Angeles, where she lives with her family. She’s expanding her private practice to serve the NPE population through counseling and education. Contact her for more information. Her podcast, “Everything’s Relative with Eve Sturges” can be found on all the podcast platforms. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter @evesturges and on Instagram @everythingsrelativepodcast. She’s also the creator of Who Even Am I Anymore: A Process Journal for the Adoptee, Late Discovery Adoptee Donor Conceived, NPE, and MPE Community. Order it here. 

By Eve SturgesBy Eve Sturges

By Mark OverbaySo what are we supposed to do the day after—the day after our lives are upended by a call, an email, a Facebook message, or by clicking on new DNA results?

Mail-away DNA kits promise adventures of discovery, mysterious and exotic cultures, and inspired histories of relatives once lost; they are instead Pandora’s boxes and, once opened, can never again be closed. My kit certainly led to discovery as promised, but not the kind seen reflected in carefully crafted and nostalgic commercials. In my case, half of my family tree, meticulously constructed over decades, lay in pieces on the floor, leaves violently stripped from limbs in a sudden storm. The father who appeared in my now fading childhood photos and forever inscribed on my birth certificate, prominently positioned on the first branch in that tree, hadn’t, I discovered, created me. His leaf was the first to fall. I numbly stared at the screen as each of my four paternal half-siblings faded entirely away. A full-sibling transformed into a half-sibling. My paternal tree was bare.

DNA tells no lies, and the truths it reveals can be shocking. Day One, Discovery Day, raises questions rather than answering them. What the hell just happened? Who is my father? How does one deal with a half-empty tree at 58 years old? How does one process a nearly sixty-year-old lie? With these and countless other questions racing in my mind, I did something counterintuitive and went to sleep, my brain pleading for time to decompress.

On day two of my non-paternal event (NPE) journey, I woke surprisingly calm and energized despite having no earthly idea what I needed to do next. I was accustomed to dealing with complex problems, but this was like no mystery I had ever tried to solve. I paused, took a deep breath, took inventory of what I had at my disposal, and was encouraged by what I found.

The abundance and quality of my DNA matches were tremendous assets. While there were no parent or sibling matches on my list, there was an individual labeled as a possible “1^st cousin” who had a publicly available tree with 1000+ entries. All by itself, that was a gold mine. I also matched with several dozen second and third cousins and noted the same surname repeatedly appeared in that group. A quick cross-reference with my first cousin’s tree found that same name within his first two generations, so the odds favored I was on to something important right away. Was that my father’s name?

While I technically had a free Ancestry account, I quickly discovered that I would need to upgrade to gain access to any of the choice information I needed to fill in the many voids in my understanding, so I paid for the cheapest version offered. The resources available through this paid account were immense and much better than expected, but I hadn’t opted for the more expensive plan that provided access to old newspapers. I quickly learned that was a mistake, so I did what any other mature and law-abiding citizen would do in my situation and became a Google and social media stalker.

I created a private family tree focused entirely on my new paternal side, buoyed by the perks and freedoms offered by a paid Ancestry account. In the beginning, this unique tree was winterized, not a leaf in sight. Despite that, it was comforting to know I could use this proxy as my personal DNA spreadsheet, adding or subtracting new names and dates as I experimented with various paternal hypotheses. There were also many unfamiliar terms and tools I’d encountered early on this path. What was a centimorgan, and why was that important? Who was an NPE, and was I one? What does “DNA Painter” paint? I needed to learn this new language of genetic genealogy and took up this study earnestly and with a focus that would have made my medical school professors proud. I cheated, though, and watched YouTube videos repeatedly until some of it sunk in. Please don’t tell them.

Armed with a new vocabulary and growing confidence, I added the names of the people I thought were my paternal grandparents to my proxy tree. As it turns out, they were very distantly related (5^th cousins) and, before marriage, shared the same surname. This explains why there were so many of my close matches with that name. While no one source identified all their children, I was gradually able to piece together a comprehensive list. They had seven children, six of them boys, spaced over fourteen years. Each son became a leaf on my proxy tree.

In the meantime, I sorted through my mother’s archives. My mother was the family genealogist, historian, and archivist. She’d neatly cataloged our lives by carefully collecting, storing, and displaying family photos and memorabilia. From my first haircut to her grandson’s kindergarten graduation, no momentous event went undocumented. Mom left behind crates and boxes of scrapbooks, photo albums, and genealogic records. Since her passing, I hadn’t looked at them, so years of dust added weight to these treasures. She was a packrat, and there were mountains of records to pour through. While I didn’t expect to find an envelope with my name on it containing a letter titled “Mark, this is the real story of your father,” I was sure hoping for exactly that. There was, of course, no such letter. Even though she, like me, was born in Tennessee, I knew after college she lived and worked for a few years in central Florida, in the same area that my newly discovered paternal grandparents had lived. That had to be an important clue, but if she’d ever told me the details of where she lived and taught, I’d forgotten them. I was looking for that kind of needle in this voluminous haystack. I didn’t find anything revealing in my first pass through her archives. On a second pass, though, on a card measuring a mere 2 x 2 inches, the name and dates of where and when she taught were printed. I had missed it the first time through. As it turned out, this unassuming little card was the key to unlocking my mystery.

My best guess was that my biological father was close in age to my mother and so, at least temporarily, eliminated a few of the possible brothers from contention. I had narrowed my list to the three most likely and began to dig deeper into each one. By sheer luck, the first Google search I started yielded an obituary that stopped me cold. When a photo is included in an obituary, typically it is one taken within a few years of the individual’s passing. This image, however, was of a much younger man who, to my eyes, looked just like me. Breathlessly, I read his biography. He had taught at the same school as my mother during the same time. The physician part of my brain reminded me that it wasn’t proof but was extraordinarily compelling evidence. The emotional side of my brain, though, knew I had just found my father. The author of this obituary had unknowingly left me breadcrumbs to find him.

I was both thrilled and unnerved. Many take years to find their father. I had found mine in just a few days. This had been too easy, and that made me nervous. I needed someone to look over my work to see if I had made a mistake. I contacted a group I read about in some genetic genealogy-related material. I turned over all my DNA information to a DNA angel, including my proxy tree. My angel was thorough, compassionate, and amazingly efficient. In just a few hours, she confirmed my research. I had found my father. She recommended that I ask a half-sibling to submit a DNA sample for a more visually comforting verification, especially for my new biological kin. This, however, would require a massive leap in my journey.

I knew from the obituary I had five new half-sisters, but reaching out to one of them felt too big a jump to consider. Instead, I contacted my closest DNA match, who I now know was a half-nephew. He was kind and empathic while also protective of his mother and aunts. After thoughtful consideration, he agreed to share my information with his mom, telling me he had no idea how she would respond. Knowing that the road to biological family connection was littered with bad outcomes, I waited nervously for whatever awaited me, braced for denial, anger, and rejection.

Twenty-two days after my NPE discovery and five agonizingly long hours since I last heard from my nephew, I got the news. The youngest of my new half-sisters reached out through Facebook, warmly welcomed me to the family, and included three photos of our father. She volunteered to submit a DNA sample. We began to talk immediately. Three days later, I heard from another sister. She was equally kind and accepting. Many more photos and long conversations followed. Within a few short weeks, I had heard from them all. Each graciously shared photos, press clippings, and memories of my father. While we had no script, we began to process this most unlikely of unions through, at times, challenging but honest conversation, laughter, and tears.

I had been made whole again. The bare half of my family tree now had budding leaves. Together, we pondered what came next.Mark Overbay is a (retired) physician and in his second career as an academic school dean at a small college nestled in the mountains of Tennessee. He’s an avid reader, captivated by the wonder and complexity of the human condition. At 58 years old, an unexpected DNA discovery forced a reexamination of his prior perceptions of family and identity, and that ever-winding journey continues. Overbay is an amateur painter, novice writer, and a lover of freshly-brewed, loose-leaf Chinese teas. He met his wonderful and supportive wife while both attended medical school, and they have been inseparable for more than 35 years. They have one son and two high-energy Labrador Retrievers, Whiskey and Yona.

By Michelle Talsma Everson

By Mark OverbayIn a single afternoon, I experienced both sides of the non-paternity event (NPE) / biological family fence, and it all started with an unexpected phone call from a friend.

I was traveling out of state and three hours from home. Only a few minutes after I transitioned from the backroads of scenic North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains to congested I-40, I received a text from a familiar name. Because I was driving, I called back rather than texted. I knew him as both a friend and professionally from a previous vocation and didn’t find the text unusual. Although the call started with small talk, like many conversations, I perceived some nervousness and hesitancy in his tone, so I encouraged him to “just spit it out.”

He told me that he’d purchased a DNA kit as a Christmas gift for his sister, the family’s historian and amateur genealogist, and she’d discovered something unexpected in her results. The entirety of their father’s side was missing in her DNA matches. Perhaps thinking there was a mistake, she encouraged her brother, my friend, to submit his sample. He found the same results; there were no DNA matches on his dad’s side. Over months of research, she had carefully and painstakingly pieced together a picture that seemed to reveal their biological father. His sister had reached out to this person and he consented to submit a DNA test for confirmation. The results were in. My father was their biological father. My friend told me we were half-brothers.

Life doesn’t equip you for every moment, and this was one of those moments for which I was unprepared. I had no script to follow, no foundations on which to rest or react. While still weaving through increasingly heavy traffic as I slowly edged toward Asheville, I inquired about the ages of my friend and his sister. Quick mental math revealed that the older had been conceived when I was two and the younger three years later. Though my parents later divorced, they were married during the births of both of these individuals. As shocking as it was, this news somehow too comfortably aligned with the mental image I had developed about my father. My father and I were significantly misaligned in nearly every meaningful aspect of personality, temperament, demeanor, and worldview. We have been estranged for years. I chuckled out loud as I processed it all.

There was, however, a certain uneasiness that began forming in the back of my head. I had submitted a sample for DNA analysis several years earlier, primarily because of curiosity about my ethnicity. I had given the DNA matches section little attention. My father, my friend, and his sister, all closely related, should have been recently added to my match list, yet I hadn’t received a single notification from the DNA company that these new persons had been added for my review. As several direct-to-consumer DNA companies offer this kind of service, I first thought my new relatives had used a test from a company different than the one I used, but my new half-brother confirmed that they’d used the same company I had. My next thought was that I was no longer notified when matches appeared. This seemed entirely plausible as I gave very little thought to these matters. I didn’t have the company app on my phone, I had forgotten my password, and I hadn’t brought my laptop. I was several hours from home and unable to further investigate this possibility.

In the continuing awkwardness that this kind of conversation quite naturally brings, my friend blurted out the question: “You’re the adopted one, right?”

“Adopted? Hell no, I wasn’t adopted,” was my immediate and somewhat embarrassingly defensive reply.  I’d seen my birth certificate on many occasions. I had a copy at home. My father was listed as my father. The brother I was raised with couldn’t be adopted either, as he favored dad in both looks and several aspects of disposition. This adoption thing was wholly unexpected and unsettling. I wasn’t chuckling any longer. He was surprised by my reaction and referred me to his sister, as she had supplied him with this bit of information. I called her immediately, and she confirmed the story. My father had told her that mom was pregnant but not by him, and he married her and “adopted” me despite that. Never once in my 58 years had he or mom told me this story. Instead, he decided to reveal this to a stranger, assuming that I already knew. My mother, stricken with Alzheimer’s in her last years, had taken that secret to her grave. The rest of the drive was a blur. When I finally made it home, I rushed to my laptop, opened the DNA app, and checked my matches. There were no new close matches. My father, my friend, and his sister weren’t there. I searched all 80,000+ of my DNA matches for my surname. Not a single match appeared. As a series of waves rushed over me, a realization unfolded. My father wasn’t my father, at least biologically. The brother I was raised with was likely not a full sibling. My friend and his sister weren’t new half-siblings after all. I wasn’t adopted as my father had revealed, at least in the legal definition of the term. My mother was my biological mother. I found several names I recognized from her side of the DNA match list. I had no idea who my biological father was. In just a few hours, my family history unraveled. Fifty percent of my family tree was utterly wrong. I immediately shared all this with my wife and son and then called my brother and friend to inform them of my discovery.

As the reality set in, an unexpected calmness enveloped me. This genetic enlightenment, oddly, was both liberating and validating for me. As I became older, the differences and distance between my father and me grew wider and wider. I struggled to understand how two people could be any more unlike each other. I didn’t want to be anything like him and feared that somehow the pull of his genetic nature, whatever that meant, would slowly invade mine. I was conscious of the possibility and intentional with my thoughts and actions to guard against it. To learn there was no genetic blueprint with his stamp on it inside me was cathartic. A virtual weight had been lifted from my shoulders that I hadn’t realized was there. The change was immediately palpable.

After a fitful night’s sleep, I awoke energized. Although I had no idea how to do so, I was determined to find my biological family. While that’s another story, my “both sides of the fence” experiences helped better prepare me for what was to come.Mark Overbay is a retired physician in his second vocation serving students in higher education. An avid reader, he’s highly interested in exploring the magic and mystery of the human condition. He’s an amateur painter and a novice writer. Overbay believes that writing informs and, hopefully, improves his thinking and processing. He and his wife of more than 30 years have one son and two young, energetic chocolate labs, Whiskey and Yona.

In 1995, when Peter J. Boni’s mother experienced a stroke after open heart surgery, the walls she’d built to hold back a secret for nearly half a century crumbled. In rehab, she began to tell visitors what she never told him—that his father wasn’t his father, that he’d been donor conceived. And so began a quest to learn the truth of his origins and the nature of the societal forces that led to the circumstances of his birth—the subject of his new book, Uprooted: Family Trauma, Unknown Origins and the Secretive History of Artificial Insemination.

Roughly halfway through his narrative Boni says, “Never doubt my resolve.” But his dogged determination is evident from the first page. Early on, it’s clear that after serving as a US Army Special Operations Team Leader in Vietnam, he was the go-to guy in his business sphere, where he was a successful high-tech CEO/entrepreneur/venture capitalist and more—and he tore into his personal mystery with the same can-do attitude—a tenacity that fueled him through the 22 years it took to solve the puzzle of his parentage.

Uprooted is comprised of four parts that add up to exceptional storytelling. It’s compelling memoir of a troubled childhood with an unwell father, a determination to succeed, and the challenges of grappling with the emotional fallout of his family’s secrets. It’s also an exhaustive and insightful account of the history of assisted reproductive technology; a cogent indictment of the flaws of the largely unregulated, multi-billion-dollar industry; and a rallying cry for advocacy with a prescription for change.

Boni’s scope is ambitious and he succeeds on every level. Donor conceived people will see themselves reflected in his moving testimony about the consequences and repercussions of the inconvenient truth of donor conception. Many will feel seen and heard as he describes genealogical bewilderment and the roiling emotions aroused by the revelation of family secrets, the shattering of comfortable notions of identity, and the lack of knowledge about his genetic information. It’s a must-read not only for donor conceived people but also for donors and recipient parents as well as fertility practitioners, lawmakers, behavioral health providers, and anyone contemplating creating a family through assisted reproduction. While the actors in a deeply flawed industry who are motivated solely by profit aren’t likely to be swayed by Boni’s arguments or embrace his suggested reforms, Uprooted may fuel a wildfire of advocacy that has the potential to give rise to meaningful legislation, transparency and accountability, and a true cultural shift.Let’s talk about language. With respect to people affected by misattributed parentage, I’m increasingly interested in the words we use about ourselves and our experiences and the words others use about us. You use the words bastard and illegitimate, mostly in the context of the history of donor conception and when discussing the societal and legal ramifications. What are your feelings about each of these words? Do you find them offensive or descriptive or neutral?

Yes, “illegitimate” and “bastard” are emotionally charged and offensive words by today’s standards, aren’t they! I wanted to share the emotional connotation of those words with the reader. I felt rather outraged by the label. To defend myself, I intellectualized it. In my research for my origins, I needed to understand the societal backdrop that fueled my parents’ decision to conceive me in such stealth via an anonymous sperm donor.

Those words were so descriptive of the then prevailing attitudes fostered by Church and State, which had evolved over centuries. A Time article, dated February 26, 1945 (near the time of my conception), amplified that backdrop. It had recapped a ruling in Superior Court on the legal status of a donor conceived child. In the eyes of the court, the wife had committed adultery, the husband was granted a divorce on those grounds, and the child was deemed “illegitimate.” The articled was titled “Artificial Bastards?” Yes, that was with a question mark. Those attitudes contributed to driving the donor insemination practice underground. My parents’ fertility practitioner coached them on how to make me look “legitimate.” They were instructed to take their closely held secret to the grave.

I used “Artificial Bastard” as the working title for my book during its early drafting (retitled Uprooted, with help from my publisher). No neutrality on my part. It was personal.

Early on and throughout much of the book, instead of referring to your biological father, you’ve referred to your “paternal seed.” I don’t believe you ever referred to your donor as your father, biological or otherwise. Why did you choose that word and what did that choice mean to you? And when speaking with your sister, you referred to “her father,” “her brother.” What went into the choice of words here?

For me, my dad may not have been biological, but I was fortunate; he wanted to be a dad and was terrific at it. He gave me absolutely no indication that he was anything other than my genetic father. Discovering 33 years after his death that our relationship wasn’t genetic actually magnified my reverence for him. It also rekindled my grief over his death. He’ll forever be my dad. Referring to my biological father as “the source of my seed” protected me from the emotional construct of the word “father” applied to an unknown person with whom I had no such loving relationship.

I discovered the source of my paternal biology thanks to a DNA test and the open embrace of my biological father’s natural daughter (AKA my half-sister). When she asked me “How should I refer to him, I mean, Dad?” I responded rather callously, but genuinely. “He’s your dad, not mine. It was never his intention to be my dad. He sold his sperm to enable someone else to be my dad.”

Her brother (my half sibling), gave me no such open embrace. Once again, to defend myself from the bonding word “brother” applied to someone who showed no interest in my existence, I found it less threatening and emotionally safer to refer to him dispassionately as “her brother.”

We sometimes use the word identity loosely–or maybe it’s more accurate to say that it means something different to different people. How do you define identity and how do you feel your identity changed after your mother’s revelation and again later when you discovered your sister and the facts of your origin?

Identity is complicated. Nature, nurture, or a combination of both?

I always credited who and what I had become (my identity) to three major experiences. First, a disruptive childhood enhanced my adaptability. Second, an education from a fine state college opened innumerable doors of opportunity for me. Third, on-the-ground service as a special operations infantry officer in Vietnam shaped my collaborative leadership style. Wait a minute! What about my DNA? I always took that for granted. My last name had its roots in Northern Italy.

“Genealogical bewilderment” was a term I studied in a college psychology class. It was applied to the adopted who had experienced developmental and belonging issues as they sought for missing pieces of their genealogy. Upon learning that I was “semi-adopted,” I poked myself. I was still the same person, but everything had changed for me. All the stories of family lore were a fabrication. My birth certificate was a hoax. If not Northern Italian, what was I? Who was I?

My dad suffered from debilitating bouts of depression. As a younger man, he could shake them off. As he aged, he could no longer do so. He took his own life when I was sixteen. Dad’s old-school Italian family treated his mental illness as a shameful flaw to be hidden, lest it spill over onto them. Suicide of a loved one creates a wound that never heals. I felt flawed, inadequate, vulnerable, abandoned, and alone. I feared that this gene might pass onto me or my offspring. I camouflaged those feelings with bravado and kept his suicide a closely guarded secret. I vowed to become accomplished, always strong, and invulnerable. Isn’t that what my future family would need from me?  Had I overcompensated and shaped my behavior based upon a willful lie?

How could I feel deceived and relieved, sad and joyous, shame and pride…all at the same time? The feelings sometimes came in waves, either soft and soothing or churning and crashing. My experiences and how I dealt with them were mine. But what were the origins of my athleticism, my stamina and endurance, my intellect, and my tenacious will? Why was leadership so important to me? My identity had been challenged by this revelation. Was I the victim of identity fraud? Worse yet, was I a fraud?

My fervent need to know my genetic origins, health history and whether or not I had any siblings poured high octane gasoline on this blaze to fuel my relentless research…for 22 years…until I discovered my answers. During that process, with the help of some therapy, I bonded with the cartoon character Popeye. I still quote him often. “I yam what I yam”—no more flawed than anyone else!

Equipped with a healthier sense of myself, I finally uncovered my paternal genealogy (the source of my seed), a giving sister, and my genetic health history, all of which I could share with my children. With my persona intact, I better understood the origin of some of my characteristics, physical and otherwise. I wasn’t looking to create a new family. I had a loving one. But this unveiling was such a home run for me! I’m an only child with a couple of siblings I adore. We have a terrific friendship based upon unusual circumstance. Mission accomplished! I feel whole and complete. I am donor conceived, and I know my truth.

I find it interesting that we say “I am donor conceived” or “I’m an NPE” as opposed to I was donor conceived or I was an NPE, as if being donor conceived or an NPE isn’t something that happened to us but something we are. What are your thoughts?

I was born on December 12th. In astrological terms, that makes me a Sagittarius. It isn’t that I once was a Sagittarius. I am a Sagittarius. It isn’t that I was an NPE, misattributed, donor-conceived. I am. I will be donorconceived for the rest of my life. It can’t be changed. That truth has not defined me, but it does add to my identity.

Several times you used the word logical—as in “I was a logical Guidaboni.” I don’t recall seeing that before. Can you explain why you used that word and what it means to you?

My Italian cousin Eddie deserves the creative footnote for “logical.” He was the first of my paternal relatives with whom I shared my newly discovered donor conception. Since our relationship was no longer biological, Eddie coined me his “logical” cousin; a “logical” Italian. Doing so acknowledged our mutual feeling that blood alone does not define family. We were both keenly aware that we shared common experiences, common family stories of victory, rebounding from defeat, values and traditions, common foods, a common enemy at times (the elders when we misbehaved), and a common definition of hospitality—all part of our common upbringing.

Eddie is thrilled for me that I found my truth. It is only logical that our mutual feelings of family bond have intensified since my initial revelation and final discovery.

You used the word loneliness at one point to describe the feeling of having discovered this enormous secret in your life. Can you describe how the experience produces loneliness?

Allow me to give you a frame of reference for that feeling of loneliness.

As a small unit infantry commander in a combat zone, I led a competent team of people through the fear, stress, chaos, and confusion of hostile enemy fire. At times, I made life and death decisions in an instant, without complete pieces of information. I used those skills in my business career as a CEO in order to right organizations that had run aground. Leadership is a lonely place. There are competing opinions and interests all vying for attention. Only you hold the ultimate accountability. In war, the cost of accomplishing a mission can be as high as life or death. In business, the ultimate cost is measured in money, but it includes organizational longevity and career security, which can impact many thousands of people. These were unique experiences, from a unique perspective, shared by very few. My fellow infantry officers and fellow CEOs provided me with a sharing support group of sorts to help process those unique experiences and learn from the experiences of other people who have walked that walk. Collective wisdom is a powerful thing.

Upon this donor conception discovery, I felt genuinely alone. Who could relate? As I shared my confusing feelings with a closed circle of friends and family, their well-intending platitudes only enhanced my feelings of isolation. (“You at least know that you were loved and wanted” or “You are still the same person.”) Sure, I had empathetic friends and family and a fine trauma therapist. But throughout my entire 22 years of searching, I longed to meet and speak with other donor conceived people who shared my emotions from their own unique experiences to help me process and validate these confusing feelings. They were likely few and far between. Who were they? Where were they? Did they even know that they were donor conceived? I was surrounded by the love of so many, but I longed for company.

Moving away from language, but related to that last question, you write about having discovered the group We Are Donor Conceived. Can you talk about how important that discovery was and how it helped you not feel alone?

I received loving empathy and support from helpful friends and family. I had engaged an able therapist. They were able to “talk the talk,” but they had never “walked the walk.”  No handbook was readily available on how to walk that donor conceived walk. The internet and twenty-first century technology came to my rescue.

I googled “donor conceived and misattributed people.” Up popped We Are Donor Conceived, a private Facebook group that had only been in existence since 2016. It was comprised of several thousand donor conceived people from around the globe who had experienced the impact of misattribution and genealogical bewilderment from the surreptitious practice of artificial insemination by donor.

Everyone had their own unique story. Some had learned by the surprising results of their recreationally taken DNA test. Like me, they had experienced a range of emotions—sometimes simultaneously: anger, relief, violation, deceit, curiosity, shock, shame, isolation numbness, pride, grief, confusion, embarrassment, emptiness, sadness, joy, fulfillment, indifference, or a combination of high and low feelings that changed over time with more knowledge. Members of the group shared how they had discovered, processed, and benefitted (or not) from what they had discovered.

I was no longer alone. I had a nonjudgmental community with whom to share feelings, tactics, and strategy. This community had walked the walk. The power of collective wisdom from uniquely experienced people has been priceless.

You mentioned therapy quite a bit—how important was therapy to you in navigating your discovery and in your search for your roots?

This whole identity disruption I found traumatizing. The social context in which I had grown up and spent my adulthood (in both the war room and the board room) reinforced the attitude that weak and needy people were inadequate and unsuitable for command. Only the weak needed therapy.

In my case, this genetic identity trauma triggered flashbacks of a dysfunctional childhood, three decades of grief for my dead dad that I never allowed myself to fully experience, and the PTSD of war. It was difficult for me to admit. I was a CEO who needed some professional help to navigate the volcanic fallout from my changing genetic landscape. I did so discreetly.

My therapist was deadpan serious when he said, “You hit a trifecta. Newly experienced trauma often resurges others long past.” To effectively deal with my identity disruption, I had to deal with all three issues. I never worked so hard in all my life. In the process of searching for my roots, I had discovered myself.

At one point you wrote, “My persona had become softer, yet I had grown stronger, both personally and professionally, as a result of my intense, identity-challenging ten years from 1995 to 2005.” Can you say more about what you meant by that?

Therapy hammered into me that “flawed” is a human condition. It is okay to be blemished. Everyone has baggage. My therapy constructed a better handle for me to carry it. My unresolved baggage from childhood and war ruled my behavior. Never vulnerable, always strong; make tough, logical decisions without letting my feelings get in the way. That personality profile worked for me in the jungle as a Special Operations Team Leader and certainly in my chosen career. It was not working in my adult home.

My wife and I were in the midst of a marital crisis at the outset of my trifecta. We had issues. I had learned to deny my feelings and fears. To top it off, she found that the privacy with which I carried my feelings, my invulnerable air, had robbed her of an intimacy with me that she craved. For her, our relationship had not grown. It was shallow and incomplete. The leftover anger from a traumatic, life-altering Vietnam combat experience wore thin, too.

Gaining this deeper understanding of where I came from and who I am went a long way in helping to heal my marriage. I had learned to reveal more of myself to my inner circle and to connect more intimately with my wife and others close to me.

As a CEO for companies facing difficulty, I always thought I had provided the right kind of collaborative leadership. People followed me to take the hill. But I found that by adding an air of intimacy and revealing more of myself, the quality of my leadership increased markedly, as measured by the high caliber and low turnover of the teams that I built and the size of the hills my teams were able to conquer. No hill for us climbers!

Popeye might have said “I yam what I yam.” Perfect? No! But I was able to add, “I yam better than I yam.”

What most surprised you during your research into the field of assisted reproduction?

A whole host of discoveries surprised me as I researched the scandalous history and evolution of assisted reproductive technology, but two things stand out.

First, the unregulated practice of assisted reproductive technology has enabled dozens, even hundreds, of siblings, all unknown to one another, to be conceived from the same gamete donor, with no requirements for testing or registry and with no laws to combat what we term “fertility fraud.” A friend of mine who used to breed Rottweilers said it best. “The breeding of puppies enjoys greater legislative oversight.”

Second, a staggering number of us are misattributed, for whatever the circumstances. That is compounded by the generational impact. The experts estimate that 2% to 4% of us are misattributed; our DNA and our birth certificates don’t jive. While some make a calculated case that this number is a bit less, others make a cogent case that it is actually much higher. Either way, I find that number unfathomable. For instance, in my high school graduating class of 100, using that 2% to 4% estimate, two to four of my classmates are misattributed. I’m one of them. I have helped two other classmates interpret their DNA test results to the same conclusion. In a typical family tree, we have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and so forth. When applied a few generations out, in geometric fashion, all 100 of my classmates are misattributed to (at least) one of their third to sixth great grandparents. There are over 50 million people in DNA databases today. How many have experienced their own identity trauma with an accidental discovery? How many more have yet to discover that something doesn’t jive? There remains much more trauma yet to come.

There’s been some criticism of those of us who believe both that genetic inheritance matters and that we have a right to know our genetic identity, and that this emphasis on genetic information promotes the primacy/superiority of genetic family at the expense of nontraditional families? How would you respond to such criticism?

The right to know one’s genetics and the bonds of family, traditional or nontraditional, are not mutually exclusive. For instance, I can love my dad, not biological, and want, even need, to understand my genetics all at the same time. My “logical” cousin, Eddie, would agree.

As you know, many aren’t able to put all the pieces together as you did or haven’t found welcoming family. It may be hard to imagine, but how do you think your life might be different now had you not put together the pieces, had you not figured out the source of the seed, had you not been embraced by new family?

To put my answer to this question in context, I ran PSYOP missions in Vietnam. At times, we conducted Operation Wandering Soul. It exploited the superstition that the dead must be put to rest in their ancestral burial ground or their spirit would be doomed to wander forever.

I have reaped the benefits of therapy to better carry my baggage. I never aspired to develop a new family. My new sibling relationships are a bonus. In the absence of my final discovery, however, I expect I’d remain emotionally healthy, but the fire of genealogical bewilderment would endlessly rage within me. I imagined that I would be that agonizingly Wandering Soul, never at rest.

How did the experience of writing this book change you, if at all?

Before writing this book, I considered myself a retired venture capitalist, former high-tech CEO, combat veteran, non-profit leader, recreational sailor, and fun-loving grandfather. I still am. But this experience awoke my inner Don Quixote.

Mark Twain once said “The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

Today, I am an author and an activist for the rights of the donor conceived.PETER J. BONI credits his disruptive childhood, a state college education from UMass Amherst, decorated on-the-ground service as a US Army Special Operations Team Leader in Vietnam (coined his “Rice Paddy MBA”), plus luck-of-the-draw DNA with making him the person he is today. Out of his accomplished business career (high-tech CEO, venture capitalist, board chairman, non-profit leader, award-winning entrepreneur, senior advisor) grew his first book, All Hands on Deck: Navigating Your Team Through Crises, Getting Your Organization Unstuck, and Emerging Victorious. The father of two and grandfather of three, he lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Find him on the web, on Twitter @PeterJBoni1, and on Instagram @peterjboni.

In Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, prolific essayist Melissa Febos, author of the memoir Whip Smart; Abandon Me; and the bestselling essay collection Girlhood, blends memoir with insight and guidance about the art of writing, primarily for an audience of memoirists.

Why highlight a book about the craft of writing in a magazine for adoptees, donor conceived people, and others who’ve experienced misattributed parentage? What does it have to do with you?

Possibly everything.

You needn’t be a writer to be inspired and educated by Body Work. The author’s razor-sharp insights are pertinent to anyone who wants to excavate their own truths; interrogate their traumas and their shame; and, especially, take ownership of their narratives.

To be adoptees or NPEs* means that part of our stories—the most foundational parts—were taken from us before we could ever know them. They were stolen for a host of reasons, but typically to keep others from facing uncomfortable truths—a theft that not only deflected shame from them but projected it onto us, suggesting that we are its source. Secrets were kept from us, and our stories were rewritten to better fit others’ narratives and preserve their integrity at the expense of our own. Our stories may be hidden behind closed doors, guarded by gatekeepers who insist we have no right to try to open them. If we persist and manage to unlock the doors, those for whom secrecy was in their best interest may tell us that what we discover is not ours to share. Sometimes we tell ourselves these lies.

Right out of the gate, Febos blows up any responsibility we might feel to hold tight to our stories and privately tend our traumas, and she positions storytelling as a strategy of reclamation. “Writing,” she says, “is a form of freedom more accessible than many and there are forces at work in our society that would like to withhold it from those whose stories threaten the regimes that govern this society.”

In those words it’s easy to see the adoptee/NPE world as a microcosm of that larger society—in which the secret keepers who are threatened by our stories try to inhibit our voices. In this regard, her prescription is equally apt: “Fuck them. Write your life. Let this book be a totem of permission, encouragement, proof, whatever you need it to be.”

In literary criticism, the genre of memoir has been a durable punching bag, dismissed and derided—despite is popularity—as a vain and trivial exercise in “naval-gazing.”  It’s a judgment that tells would-be storytellers their histories aren’t worthwhile and their traumas are unseemly—not for public consumption. Febos annihilates the argument and makes a compelling case that personal narrative can be healing to the teller at the same time it’s a balm for readers. Writing, she says, “has become for me a primary means of digesting and integrating my experiences and thereby reducing the pains of living, or if not, at least making them useful to myself and to others. There is no pain in my life that has not been given value by the alchemy of creative attention.”

She brilliantly explores what’s behind the dismissal of the form and, in particular, the admonition not to write about trauma, and turns the criticism on its head, asserting that writing about trauma is subversive and that resistance to the stories of oppressed people “is a resistance to justice.” Telling one’s story, Febos says, is, in fact, a requirement for recovery from trauma and for integrating the experience into one’s life.

To everyone who’s bought into this idea that trauma is a private matter not suitable to written expression, she’s emphatic: “Listen to me: It is not gauche to write about trauma. It is subversive. The stigma of victimhood is a time-worn tool of oppressive powers to gaslight the people they subjugate into believing that by naming their disempowerment they are being dramatic, whining, attention grabbing, or else beating a dead horse. By convincing us to police our own and each other’s stories, they have enlisted us in the project of our own continued disempowerment.”

Febos acknowledges secrets as the seed of almost all her writing and recognizes the power of untold secrets to imprison. She argues that writing can liberate us both from our fears about the subjects we hesitate to write about and form the isolation we feel about them, demonstrating to ourselves and readers that we’re not alone.

The third of the book’s four essay chapters, “A Big Shitty Party: Six Parables About Writing About Other People,” will be of special interest to many NPEs who wonder how to tell their stories when doing so may cause collateral damage. Febos asks who has the right to tell a story and offers perspective for how to look at the ethical issues that may arise when the narrative you have to share could upset or wound others.

Whether you wish to write to publish or to simply to bear witness and feel heard, there’s much in Body Work that will validate your aspirations and inform your process. Febos inspires and encourages and insists not only that personal narratives are valuable but also that creating and sharing them are imperative. If you’ve been shamed, made vulnerable, been traumatized, told that your story isn’t yours to tell, Body Work will speak to you.

*NPE: not parent expected, non-paternal event, non-paternity event—BKJ

By Maegan Bergeron-ClearwoodFirst, if you feel called to read this essay, then you belong here. Welcome. Do you belong in the Jewish community? Are you a part of this religion, culture, and peoplehood? Are you actually technically Jewish at all? To give a very Jewish answer: yes, no, maybe. It depends. But this journey of exploration and curiosity—of questioning and wrestling—is absolutely yours for the taking. So welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Not everyone along the way will greet you with such open arms, so I want to make sure that mine are stretched extra wide.

An NPE* discovery is complicated enough, but when compounded by an ethnicity discovery—a Jewish ethnicity discovery especially—the complications are magnified. And Jewish identity is complicated enough, even for people who were raised Jewish. DNA testing may be new, but the question of “who counts as a Jew” is as old as Judaism itself. Judaism is an ethnicity, as you may have just learned unexpectedly, but it’s also a culture, a spiritual practice, a community, a set of laws, a set of holy days, and unendingly more. How many of those boxes must a person tick in order to be counted among the tribe? The answer remains: it depends.

There’s a beloved aphorism: for every two Jews, you get three opinions. Judaism is far more concerned with asking questions than it is with answering them. So if you came to this article asking “Am I Jewish?” be forewarned: you won’t get a clear answer. But you will, I hope, get a solid footing for the start of your journey, should you choose to embark.

The Rabbinic Answer

Let’s start with the answer you’d be most likely to get if you googled “Am I Jewish?” Or, let’s say you told a rabbi: “I just found out that I’m biologically half Jewish because the dad that I thought was my dad isn’t my dad and my DNA isn’t what I thought it was—what does that mean?” First, the rabbi would probably respond the same way most people do: a polite “please slow down because I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” or something of that ilk. Then, the rabbi would likely say that, according to halakha (Jewish law), you must be born to a Jewish mother or have entered the faith through conversion. For an NPE, then, this sounds like a resounding no: you are not, by law, a Jew. A reform or reconstructionist rabbi (these are the more socially progressive and halakhically creative of the four main Jewish denominations: learn more here) would tell you that patrilineal Jews count, but only if they’re raised Jewish—so you’re still out of luck.

Don’t take any of this to mean that rabbis are unfeeling jerks who won’t empathize with your situation, or that you shouldn’t seek out a rabbi with a curious heart, or even that all rabbis follow this halakhic law. But “Welcome to the tribe” might not be the first words out of a rabbi’s mouth when they hear your story, no matter how desperate you were to hear them said.

As NPEs, we are no strangers to rejection. We get it on all sides: from the families that raised us, for stirring up trouble; from our new biological families, for daring to exist; from our friends and partners, for being so damn depressing all the time. It’s particularly devastating, then, to seek refuge in our newfound ethnicity only to be turned away. These DNA results were what pushed us off the path of seeming normalcy to begin with, and now we’re being told that our DNA is not enough? If I’m not who I was before and I’m also not Jewish, then what am I?

So before you disavow rabbinic law entirely, a bit of context. The fact that Judaism exists in the 21^st century is a miracle. There’s a joke about Jewish holidays: They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat! And it’s true: on paper, Jewish history is bleak, what with the exiles, plagues, forced assimilation, slavery, to say nothing of the literal genocide—for a people who make up less that one percent of the world’s population, our existence is nothing short of miraculous. But it’s not a Chanukah kind of miracle, where God intervened to make sure oil lasted for eight impossible nights. It’s a miracle of resilience.

For more reasons than I can go into here, Jews don’t proselytize (learn more). Instead of growing in numbers, we grow in connection; Judaism isn’t about breadth, but about depth. Across hundreds of generations, Jews have passed along laws, traditions, and maybe most importantly, texts. Some of these inheritances seem ridiculous on paper (Why is God in the Torah such a jerk? Why don’t we light fires of Shabbat? And what’s the deal with shellfish?), but they’re the fibers that connect a peoplehood across the span of thousands of miles and thousands of years. This doesn’t mean that Orthodox and other more “traditional” Jews are more Jewish than Reform or Reconstructionist Jews or even than agnostic or atheist Jews, (because yes, you can be a Jew and not believe in God). To be a Jew is not to follow every single tradition. But intentionally changing or even rejecting a tradition can be an act of keeping those threads of connection alive.

In many synagogues you’ll see a sanctuary lamp, or Ner Tamid: eternal flame. It represents the menorah of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, which was meant to burn continuously, across the generations, a symbol of God’s constant presence among the Jewish people. It sounds impossible, to keep one fire lit for thousands of years, but that’s the miraculous part: it’s still burning. In synagogues and on Shabbat tables around the world, the fire burns.

So yes, you have Jewish DNA. That means that your ancestors were part of this unending, miraculous chain of lights. What a beautiful discovery! Mazel tov! But if you knock on a rabbi’s door asking if you’re Jewish and they tell you “It depends,” or even “No,” they aren’t slamming the door back in your face. They’re just meeting your knock with a bit of healthy skepticism: your ancestors kindled the fire, true, but are you willing to do the same?

Because being Jewish is about so much more than DNA.

In fact, being Jewish isn’t about DNA at all.

The Ancestry Answer

 But it’s literally about DNA! Genetics are what got me into this reality-shattering mess to begin with! Science says that I’m Jewish, so I have to be! Right?

Yes. And no. It depends. But I would argue, that when it comes to this answer in particular, it’s mostly no.

Which is strange for me to admit, because if it weren’t for discovering my genetics, I wouldn’t be where I am today, and I love where I am today. My NPE journey is still, overwhelmingly, a hot, stinking, miserable mess of family drama and emotional upheaval. But becoming Jewish? That’s made it all worthwhile.

When I first started telling people about my NPE discovery, this was the most common response: “I always thought you looked Jewish!” My hair apparently, is a dead giveaway. So are my eyebrows. My “dark features.” My nose. Or I just give off the right vibes. “Yeah, I can see that,” people would respond. Gentiles and Jews alike, it seems, have read me as Jewish long before I knew that I had Ashkenazi parentage. Intellectually, I was always wary at of these responses. Surely there’s no way to “look Jewish,” is there? Isn’t that what the Nazis used to say to justify murdering six million of us?

And yet—it was also strangely comforting. My NPE discovery had fractured so much of what I thought to be true about myself, and this was the affirmation I craved: yes, you are different; no, you’re not crazy; yes, you belong.

The whole reason that Eastern European, or Ashkenazi, Jews show up as an ethnic group on DNA testing sites is because of a population “founder effect”: we descend from a small number of culturally isolated ancestors who rarely intermarried, so we share enough common genetic markers to classify us as distinct. Other Jewish ethnic groups, like Sephardi or Mizrahi, don’t show up with that kind of specificity. The attempt to genetically quantify “who is a Jew,” therefore, centers Ashkenazi Jews at the expense of so many other ethnic groups, Jews of color in particular (learn more about Ashkenormativity here).

And on an even more fundamental level, this quantification implies that ethnicity is a core component of Jewish identity, when in fact, the Jewish people have always been a “mixed multitude”: as far back as our exodus out of Egypt, the Jewish nation has transcended ethnicity, borders, and ancestry. To rely on a DNA test as proof of one’s Jewishness, and to equate being Jewish with looking a “certain way,” dismisses the beautiful spectrum of Jewish peoplehood, including Jews who have joined the tribe through marriage, adoption, or by choice.

The overarching implications of linking DNA to identity, however, is not only reductive and exclusionary: it’s downright dangerous. No matter where you land on the “Am I Jewish?” question, you have to tread carefully. Race isn’t biological. It’s an organizational tool for constructing social hierarchies based on difference and otherness. Jews have historically been racialized for this very purpose, across geography and time. The most glaring example is the pseudoscience of Nazi Germany, which made claims of supposed genetic markers to prove the existence of racial imperfections and justify the eradication of entire populations of people – Jewish, but also Black, Romani, the disabled, the list goes on. Genetics, both the science and the language around it, have been weaponized against Jews and other racialized groups for centuries. In these strange times of mainstream genetic testing, if I read someone’s search history and saw “Jewish ethnicity DNA,” I wouldn’t know if they were a neo-nazi or just curious about their ancestry. Which should terrify us. (Learn more about race, Jewishness, and DNA testing here.)

Technically, sure, you can call yourself Jew-ish based on DNA alone—but you run the risk of replicating some wildly dangerous rhetoric in doing so. As someone who ended up choosing to be Jewish after finding out about my Jewish ancestry, I’ve become much more familiar with the insidiousness of antisemitism, and the potential misuses of mainstream DNA testing frankly scare me. Ironic, that DNA testing is what led to my becoming a Jew in the first place, but true.

So if you’re new to this journey, I recommend doing a bit of reading: a) on antisemitism, particularly racial antisemitism, both historically and as it appears today; and b) on the incredible diversity to be found throughout the Jewish people. It’s critical that we expand our conception of what it means to be Jewish and who “counts” as a Jew; we need to recognize the glorious mixed multitude of peoplehood, of which genetics are barely a part, if at all. And we need to be careful with our words, particularly in this age of rampant xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism.

Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t explore your roots or disavow the physical traits that you inherited from your newfound Jewish ancestors—by all means, learn about your heritage and honor where you come from, if you feel called to do so. Many NPEs describe their experience as one of uprootedness, and delving into one’s Jewish ancestry can be a beautiful way of becoming re-rooted. Ashkenazi culture has so much to offer, from food and music to literature and language, so dive in! Eat, sing, read—savor it all.

Over the past four years, I’ve fallen in love with the stories of Sholem Aleichem, enjoyed lectures on theater and history the Yiddish Book Center (a wonderful resource for learning more about Ashkenazi culture), and, after some trial and error, managed to bake a few decent loaves of challah with my partner. I’ve also come to love my hair and nose in so many unexpected, tender ways, even as I remain wary of what it means to give off “Jewish vibes.”

Being visibly and genetically Jewish was my entry point into becoming Jewish, but that’s all it was: an entry point. An invitation. An awakening to new possibilities.

In a way, Jewish NPEs are weirdly lucky: we may feel hopelessly lost at family gatherings or when we look in the mirror, but at our fingertips, there’s a rich cultural roadmap for living with deep, interconnected roots. The tricky part being: we can’t just read the map. We have to actually make the journey.

Choosing an Answer

I wish I could say that discovering Jewish ancestry means that your identity suddenly makes sense. If you’re reading this article, then you’ve already been through enough emotional upheaval for a lifetime: wouldn’t it be a relief to have some simple answers for once, to just know who you are once and for all?

But remember: two Jews, three opinions. Simple answers are not, unfortunately, in the stars.

These days, you’ll probably hear the descriptor “Jew by Choice” more often than “convert to Judaism.” It’s a language choice that’s meant to recognize the activeness of the person’s journey into Judaism. It’s meant to be affirming, empowering even.

When I first started considering conversion, I bristled at this phrase. None of this was a choice. I didn’t choose to be born with this parentage; I didn’t choose to have my ancestry kept a secret; I didn’t choose to learn about my heritage in such a traumatic way. My Jewishness was thrust upon me, along with so many other complicated revelations about my identity and family history. I didn’t ask to be Jewish—I didn’t ask for any of this.

But when I look over the past four years, I realize just how many choices I’ve made along the way. When I got that email from 23andMe, I could have slammed my laptop shut and moved on as if nothing had changed. But I chose to let myself be transformed by the discovery. I chose to ask questions, I chose to do research, I chose to feel uncomfortable, and ultimately, I chose to be a Jew. I chose to light that candle, and I choose every day to keep it alive.

This article was clearly written by a Jew, someone who loves their peoplehood and religion. But I recognize that not everyone reading this is ready to seriously consider being Jewish in such an all-encompassing way. So let me frame things differently.

Recovering from trauma is all about crafting narratives. Something totally outside of your control just happened to you. Reality has become unreal. The story of your life has ripped to shreds. And the only way to unfreeze yourself, to feel in control again, is to rewrite the story, with you at the center. You didn’t choose to discover you were suddenly Jewish, but you can choose what that discovery means.

For me, becoming Jewish was a way to craft a healthy narrative. There’s a beautiful adage in Jewish mysticism, that every single Jew was present at Sinai when Moses delivered God’s commandments, when the covenant between God and the Israelites and was sealed and a united peoplehood was born. The soul of every single Jew, across history and geography, Jews of choice included, was there at the base of the mountain, being called to their place in history.

This narrative brings me comfort. Was I really at Sinai, standing alongside every single member of this sprawling, interconnected family? Is that why I felt called to respond to my Jewish ancestry discovery—because my soul was Jewish all along? Is that why all of this exhausting, traumatic family secret nonsense happened to me?

Yes. No. It depends. Chances are, I like the Sinai story because it helps me make sense of a senseless thing. It isn’t my DNA that brought me to the base of that mountain; I’m there because I choose to be. And this act of choosing doesn’t make my presence at Sinai any less true–my soul was there because I believe it to be there, and that belief is realer to me than any DNA test.

If you want to make sense of your newfound ancestry, if you want to answer the question “Am I Jewish?” once and for all, you absolutely do not have to convert to Judaism. But you also can’t just ask a rabbi or trace your genetic family tree. You have to answer the question for yourself—you have to decide whether being Jewish fits into your new narrative of personhood. Making that decision requires curiosity, energy, introspection, and lots and lots of books.

It also requires patience. You may have discovered that you had Jewish ancestry overnight, but discovering your Jewish identity will take time. It’s taken four years and counting for me, and it’s been a boundlessly radical process. It may take even longer for you. It may be wildly transformational or not a huge deal at all—but that’s not for me, a rabbi, or anyone else but you to find out.

Exploring Judaism is one of many ways to heal and construct new narratives out of an NPE experience. You’re no less valid a Jewish-ancestry-NPE if you decide against such an exploration. But if you feel called to journey, if you really need to know whether being Jewish is part of your story, then welcome.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

*NPE: not parent expected, nonpaternity event, nonparental event — discovering that a person you believed to be your parent wasn’t your genetic parent

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.

Find the author on Venmo @ottertarot.Maegan Clearwood (she/they) is a writer and theater-dabbler based out of Western Massachusetts. As an essayist and theater critic, their work has been published in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, OnStage Blog, Howlround Theater Commons, and Everything Sondheim. They earned an MFA in Dramaturgy from UMass Amherst, with a graduate certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies, and a BA in English and Theater from Washington College. Find them on Twitter @maeganwriteson and Instagram @ottertarot.Do you have a story about discovering a new ethnicity, religion, or culture? We want to hear it. Read our submission guidelines and get in touch!

By Kara Rubinstein DeyerinIt’s what those of us with misattributed parentage like to call “sibling season”—the time when people who received an over-the-counter DNA test for Christmas are getting their results. When you have a DNA surprise and learn the person who raised you is not your genetic parent, you are plummeted into a world of confusion, doubt, and shock. You feel all alone in your experience. You are likely thinking it is impossible that anyone else could have had such a crazy thing happen to them. And so when you turn to a professional—a licensed therapist—for help, the last thing you want to hear after explaining your situation during your first session is “Wow. That’s incredible. I’ve never heard of that before!”

We estimate that 1 in 20 people have misattributed parentage—that’s 16.6 million Americans who may innocently spit into a tube and discover they’re not who they thought they were. People have a misattributed parentage experience (MPE) from a variety of circumstances: they discover they’re adopted or that they were conceived through assisted reproduction or as a result of an extra-marital affair, rape, or other sexual encounter. Regardless of why someone has an MPE, the news is traumatic for many.

“After I told my therapist about my MPE, she said she had no idea how a person should respond to being told such a story.” Lisa

In Right to Know’s 2021 Survey of MPEs[1], 39% of those surveyed responded they’d sought help from a licensed therapist. Of those who saw a therapist, just only 18% felt their therapists had sufficient training in misattributed parentage issues to assist them. This needs to change.

“Today I had a therapy session with yet another new therapist. Every time I have to educate my therapist on what an MPE is, how we feel, how our situation is life altering, how we have an identity crisis, and how we search for family….” Michelle

Right to Know is a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for people with a DNA surprise and misattributed parentage and promoting understanding of the complex intersection of genetic information, identity, and family dynamics. To promote this goal, we now offer the first misattributed parentage education platform providing educational information on MPEs and the impacts of DNA surprises to professionals and the public. With this initiative, we aim to tackle one of the most important aspects of the MPE discovery—the need for training for licensed therapists and information for those affected by an MPE and the public at large.

“During my first visit to a therapist, she admitted this was all so new to everyone and she had no experience with this specific trauma, that there was no handbook on how to handle my feelings. She told me my mother had every right to lie to me, that it was her body.” Dan

When a person makes a discovery of such a potentially traumatic magnitude, properly trained licensed professionals can provide essential mental health support. We offer four core introductory courses for continuing education credit on Identity, Grief and Loss, Psychological and Ethical Impacts, and Reunion, with more classes coming soon. Learn about the CE courses at www.MPE-Education.org, and use coupon code 15%OFF on your first CE course. Right to Know has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 7181. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. Right to Know is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs. Not a therapist? We also offer these courses without education credits at a discounted price.

“After telling my therapist about my MPE, he kept calling my father that raised me my ‘stepdad.’ I cringed every time he said it; it made me uncomfortable hearing him referred to in this way.” Susan

Identity confusion can be a major part of an MPE. Identity & MPEs, taught by Jodi Kluggman-Rabb, MA, LMFT, PsyD, covers identity formation and the dimensions of identity, genealogical bewilderment, and the psychological impact of an MPE identity crisis. This class provides an overview of what an MPE is and the terms associated with a non-paternity event (NPE).

People with an MPE may be dealing with disenfranchised grief and ambiguous loss. Cotey Bowman, MA, LPC Associate, teaches Loss & Grief in MPEs through the lens of an NPE. He reviews the foundational concepts of loss and grief, discusses how this can complicate healing from an MPE, and compares treatments including artistic creation for loss and grief for people with an MPE.

Some common psychological concerns of people with an MPE include complicated grief, complex PTSD, attachment issues, identity and existential confusion, family secrecy, depression, and anxiety. Psychological and Ethical Implications of MPEs offers therapists an understanding of the themes associated with MPEs, psychological concerns and diagnoses, as well as the ethical and advocacy considerations of MPEs. Lynne W. Spencer, MA, LLP, RN, illustrates these issues from the perspective of donor conception and reviews the terms associated with assisted conception.

The prospect of deciding whether to reach out to new genetic family is daunting, especially when considering all of the possible outcomes. Leslie Pate Mckinnon, MA, LCSW, in Navigating Reunion with MPEs, takes therapists through the steps of reunion from an adoption perspective. She provides an overview of adoption terms and history, discusses the innate desire for people to know their genetic identity, and offers tips about the nuts and bolts of reunion.

These classes are just the beginning. Classes on helping parents talk to their children about their unique conception and understanding genetic sexual attraction are also in the works. If you’re interested in having Right to Know sponsor a course on a certain topic or if you’d like to teach a course, send a message to info@RightToKnow.us.

And to all our new siblings out there, we got you! We’re working hard to ensure you have access to the information and resources you need to process your MPE. If you are looking for a therapist, Right to Know maintains a list of therapists with experience working with misattributed parentage on our MPE Counseling Directory. If you need help with your DNA surprise, call 323-TALK MPE. We’re here to listen, help you identify your genetic family, find an experienced therapist in your state, and provide a mentor—all for free because no one should ever feel alone with such life-changing news.

[1] 2021 MPE Survey, Right to Know and the DNA Discussion Project (600+ respondents).Kara Rubinstein Deyerin is co-founder and CEO of Right to Know. She is a non-practicing attorney with an LLM in Taxation and an MA in trade and investment policy. In January 2018, she wanted to see where in Africa her father’s family came from. Her over-the-counter DNA test revealed she was 50% something but it wasn’t African. This meant the man on her birth certificate couldn’t possibly be her genetic father. She lost her bi-racial identity with the click of a mouse. Deyerin discovered she was 50% Ashkenazi Jew. The DNA pandora’s box she opened led to an identity crisis. She’s a passionate advocate for genetic identity rights. It is a fundamental human right to know your genetic identity.

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.

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.

By Kara Rubinstein DeyerinThe advent of over-the-counter DNA testing has unlocked the closet where many family secrets were kept. While many learn one (or both) of the parents who raised them are not their genetic parent from a DNA test, sometimes people find out in other ways. A mother with a 104-degree temperature might let it slip that she had a son as a teenager. A family friend may tell someone mourning his dad, possibly at his funeral, that the suffered from infertility and had used a sperm donor. And sometimes having a child of their own prompts individuals to search for their biological family because they grew up with a vague idea of who their fathers were. Regardless of how one learns about misattributed parentage, the process of coping with such an experience is daunting and life-changing.

Right to Know is a non-profit founded on the principle that it’s a fundamental human right to know one’s genetic identity. We believe in inclusivity and embrace anyone who facing misattributed parentage. To that end we use the term misattributed parentage experience (MPE) to describe the phenomenon of coping with the fact that you did not grow up knowing your genetic parent. It’s a term used by mental health professionals for decades. We believe the word experience best describes the long-term effects we all have, as opposed to “event,” which is a one-time occurrence. The ramifications of an MPE last a lifetime to some degree.

An MPE belongs to one of three primary communities:

• Non-paternity event (NPE): those conceived from an extramarital affair, tryst, rape or assault, or other circumstance
• Assisted conception: those conceived from donor conception (DC), sperm donation, egg donation, embryo donation, or surrogacy; and
• Adoption: those whose adoption was hidden, orphans, individuals who’ve been in foster care or are who are late discovery adoptees (LDA), etc.

United, our communities have a stronger voice to effect change in society—to promote laws to protect our rights and encourage a better understanding of our experiences.

Right to Know focuses on three pillars to support people with an MPE: education, mental health, and legislation. Adoptees are trailblazers in many of these topics, but there’s still much work to be done. Many people with an MPE feel powerless, and through our work, we hope to empower them. Advocacy and helping others often facilitates healing.

People with an MPE often are not represented in lawmaking in the U.S. In fact, some of us clearly have no rights in the eyes of the law. Right to Know advocates for changes in laws to ensure people with MPEs are represented and our fundamental right to know our genetic identity is established legally. Our legal advocacy starts with your participation at a grassroots level. We are working to pass broad-based fertility fraud legislation with criminal penalties for all types of fertility fraud along with a civil cause of action allowing for both parents and offspring to bring a lawsuit. We also encourage an additional criminal penalty and a loss of licensure for doctors who use their own sperm to inseminate patients. We’ve teamed with legislators in Iowa, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Washington to pass such legislation, with Nevada and Georgia soon to follow. We also partner with adoptee rights groups to see how we can help enact laws to ensure access to original birth certificates.

As part of RTK’s mental health initiative, we hold a monthly Community & Connection event on the first Sunday of the month at noon pacific time with a licensed therapist to discussed issues pertinent to MPEs. Past topics have included “A Look at Loss and Grief in MPEs,” “The Importance of Finding your Tribe and Feeling Supported,” and “Reaching Out to Bio-Family and Coping with the Response.” The next Community & Connection is “Identity and MPEs,” with Jodi Klugman-Rabb on Sunday, July 11. To register, send an email to RSVP@RightToKnow.us.

RTK also operates a hotline number, 323-TALK-MPE, to help people find resources to process their MPEs and pair them with someone who’s had a similar experience. To facilitate access to licensed professionals who have experience working with people with an MPE, we provide a directory so you can find a therapist to help you. We also work closely with DNAngels to help people find their genetic family.

Each month, usually on the third Sunday at noon Pacific time, RTK sponsors a webinar with world-class speakers on a topic related to MPEs. Past topics have included “Interacting with Narcissistic Moms” and “Family Members’ or Societal Perceptions of Ancestral DNA, Race, & Identity.” Find Information about upcoming webinars on the website.

RTK strives to educate the public on the complex intersection of genetic information, identity, and family dynamics through various media projects. In the fall it is launching an MPE Education website that will offer a variety of classes related to misattributed parentage.

Due to the newness of DNA testing and the surprising consequence of discovering misattributed parentage this way, there’s very little data available about MPEs, the rate of occurrence, demographics, and what we need to heal. Right to Know is excited to partner with Anita Foeman, PhD, and Bessie Lawton, PhD, from the DNA Discussion Project to gather information on MPEs through an online Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved survey that aims to understand how MPEs affect individuals,  their family relationships (both preexisting and new), and their health and determine whether sufficient recourses and access to resources exist to cope with such a discovery. Your voice matters. Please participate in this groundbreaking research to ensure people with MPEs receive the help they need in the future. If you’d like to help or need more information about Right to Know’s initiatives, send an email to info@RightToKnow.us or find us online. Find us as well on Twitter and Instagram @righttoknowus.Deyerin is a non-practicing attorney and co-founder of Right to Know. She discovered three years ago that the man named on her birth certificate was not her biological father. With the click of a mouse, she went from being half black to half Jewish. She’s a mom, wife, writer, cook, knitter, and connoisseur of all things human. Follow her blog about her own journey, Unexpectedly Jewish. BEFORE YOU GO…

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

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