[Do Not Agitate]
I learned my biological father’s name from my birth mother. She mentioned it in the first words I’d ever received from her, an email she sent shortly after her brother and sisters told her, during a Christmastime dinner, that I had found her. I had received a copy of my original birth certificate two months earlier. Her name appears, typewritten, in the blank labeled “mother;” there is also her signature in a lovely, loopy cursive. That signature was the stone that shattered the 40-year-old glass house that was my family as everyone had defined it for me.
Nothing appears in the blank labeled “father.”
I had his name, and for eight years I did almost nothing with it. I found his Facebook page. I compared a few recent photos—in a golf shirt and baseball cap with his wife, in a tux at my half-brother’s wedding—with the ones of his teenage self that I had scraped from his high school yearbooks. In none of them did I easily see either of us in the other.
I built relationships with my birth mother and her siblings. I reconstituted my identity to incorporate all our uncanny resemblances and affinities. And I found my place in The Great Timeline. I had my birth story. I had the story of her pregnancy. I had none of these links to my father, and during these eight years I did not crave them.
And I feared what might come of contact. I feared upending my new and (I feared) fragile relationship with my birth mother. She and my father ended contact when she discovered she was pregnant. I treaded gingerly around the topic, asking almost nothing, allowing her to choose how much to reveal.
In an odd sense, my path to contact with my biological father had a similar shape to the one leading to my birth mother. It started with curiosity. What could I learn about his family tree? But I had another motive. If I did reach out to him, would I need to prove his paternity? What if he needed convincing that she followed through and gave birth? This led me to online DNA genealogy.
[Do Not Announce]
Ancestry.com’s research data are extraordinary: Census records, military records, public records of all kinds. Yearbook and newspaper photos and clippings. Member-submitted documents, including letters and family pictures. And, notoriously, a vast and growing database of DNA, voluntarily submitted by people like me. Some are moved by curiosity, or from a sense of duty to chronicle the family’s history. Others, like me, have these motives but also a need: to uncover the relationships others have tried to hide.
To give your DNA to a profit-seeking publicly traded corporation is to make a deal with the devil. You surrender not only your own privacy, but that of your biological kin, knowing fully well that the high-sounding promises to safeguard your data are as vaporous as the need to please shareholders is strong. In submitting my sample I did what people close to me, like my wife, refuse to do out of principle.
As the DNA matches came in, I sorted them into two groups. There was my birth mother’s brother: 27%. After that, the relationships were more remote. I found a cousin from another branch of my birth mother’s family, on her father’s side. We messaged each other. She is a retired librarian, to my delight. We’re now Facebook friends.
My father had not submitted a sample, although he had joined the site and created a rudimentary tree. From it and others I was able to reconstruct an extensive tree, meeting such characters as my great-aunt Wanda, or “Woof-Woof,” as she was evidently known in high school.
A few other DNA matches on my father’s side were promising. I messaged them, and I heard nothing for four months. Then a reply from one: She could confirm our relationship through my father: she is his first cousin. Wanda was their aunt. She and her sister remain in touch with my father, and my existence was news to them both.
Before I submitted my DNA to Ancestry, I sent an email to my birth mother and to three of her siblings, all people I have met and with whom I have formed bonds of varying strength since reuniting eight years earlier. I wanted them all to know that I had decided to learn more about my father’s family tree, and that I might decide to reach out to him once I had genetic proof. One of my aunts replied that she was glad for me. She reminisced about going on double dates with my birth mother, my biological father, and his friend at Pittsburgh Pirates games.
Another of my aunts replied differently.
I regret sending the message. I lived half of my life in the grip of the belief that my original family relationships are secrets, and I am now struggling to free myself. I know that to send that message was to signal to my biological relatives that I am not going to hide who I am from anyone: not my biological relationships from my adoptive family, and not one half of my biological tree from the other half. But I also know (and knew then) that it is hard for my birth mother, and for those who took part in that episode in her life, to revisit it. I haven’t spoken since with the aunt who sent that message.
[Do Not Admit]
My father’s first cousin, my second cousin once removed, conferred with her sister. They welcomed me as family. But the secrecy posed a problem. They remained in regular contact with my father, and even visited occasionally, despite living on opposite coasts. They would agree to keep the secret if I wished, but it was a burden. I asked them to serve as intermediaries for an eventual contact, and they agreed. A few weeks later, I spoke with my father for the first time.
He was most eager to share family history and lore—about his uncles who had perished in World War II, about his career, about his two sons, my half-brothers. And with evident discomfort he explained that his wife, who had known that he had possibly fathered a child, was opposed to my making contact with people in her family. He said he was “working on” this. That was the last I’ve heard about it. In the months since we have exchanged a handful of text messages on holidays and birthdays. His two cousins are Facebook friends. I am planning to meet them this summer. It might be the only branch of my father’s family—my family—that will accept me.
Mother’s Day celebrates the work of mothering. It is not designed for birth mothers.
What does Father’s Day celebrate? I suppose people do offer Father’s Day tributes to their fathers for doing care work, but there is something generic about the concept of fatherhood it trades upon. To me it has always seemed like a joke—like a spoof of fatherly stereotypes. Give him some golf balls or a bottle of Scotch. Let him go fishing. A few days ago my wife insinuated that she had plans for me on Father’s Day, and I blurted out a laugh, then quickly apologized.
Does it make sense to wish my biological father a happy Father’s Day? Did he feel my absence from his life in anything like the way my birth mother did, who carried me and gave birth and watched as they took me out of the room on the understanding that the absence would be forever? I see Mother’s Day as an opportunity both to help heal that wound and to reclaim for her the status of motherhood. But Father’s Day gives me nothing to say to him. Not, anyway, as long as my existence remains a problem—a threat just outside the walls of the family stockade.
Let this be a note pinned to the stockade door. Dad, you know where to find me.