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Simcha

At first glance, this post may seem like a divergence, an off topic from my usual subject of my journey of seeking the truth about my paternity and finding my self again.  But  that is exactly why this post is extremely relevant – it is about my identity.  A key part of my self identity is that of my Jewishness.  Ever since the tragedy in Pittsburgh last weekend, I can’t stop thinking about it.  I can’t stop thinking about the hate and sadness, about what the families must be going through. I have also been thinking a lot about being Jewish and what it means to be part of the Jewish community.

I was not raised Jewish; I was, in fact, raised Catholic.  This is yet another part of my life growing up that I felt I didn’t fit in.  In Sunday school, I was always the kid raising my hand to ask questions…more questions that the adults in my life didn’t want to answer. 

When I went to college, my eyes were opened in so many ways.  I met so many people with different backgrounds, religions, and cultures. I tried to learn as much as I could from all of them. I loved to help my new friends celebrate their cultural and religious holidays – from Diwali to Passover, I enjoyed all of it.  The more I learned about Judaism, the more I wanted to know.  There was something that drew me to it. When I moved to CA, I continued to learn what I could about Judaism. I constantly asked my Jewish friends for details on Jewish beliefs, holidays and practices.  When I asked my (now) husband a question about Yom Kippur, he referred me to his mother.  She gave me The Jewish Book of Why.  I loved reading it and the more I learned, the more I wanted to know.  I took a class at the local temple and loved that the rabbi let us ask why – in fact, she asked why herself quite a bit.  I continued my Jewish education and eventually decided to convert to Judaism.  It was one of the easiest, most right decisions of my life. I felt such happiness and comfort in my decision.  When I went to the ritual bath, the mikvah, and the water washed over me, I felt such peace and sense of belonging.  I was now part of a community that welcomed me, a place where are I knew who I was.

Now that I am reassessing everything about my identity, this is one part that is rock solid and unwavering – my Jewish self.  And all the hate and anti-semitism in the world can’t change that. I chose to be a part of the Jewish community.  As part of the conversion process, I had to choose a Hebrew name.  I chose Simcha, which means “joy.” I chose Judaism to be part of me, I chose joy.  

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Sharing

How do you share a story like this?  How and when do I tell my friends that I am going through something that has turned so complex that I am still shuffling through the wreckage after a year and a half?  How do I share something that feels so shameful?

My parents told me that I was not my father’s biological daughter over the phone one Friday afternoon.  They knew I had been in contact with WD via 23andme (to try to figure out our connection) and grew concerned that I would find out on my own, so they felt like they had to tell me over the phone rather than wait for our summer visit. I remember feeling such a range of emotions all at once – confused, angry, upset, sad, betrayed, and shame.  I hung up the phone and texted my husband at work to call me immediately.  I remember that I could barely get the words out, I was sobbing so hard, I couldn’t catch my breath.  I then spoke with my friend, R, in NYC.  We have been friends since we were 8 years old and grew up together.  Both my husband and R reminded me that I had always known something like this deep down, but also understood how earth shattering it was for me.  Even though the wound was fresh and still bleeding, it wasn’t hard to tell the 2 of them because they knew my history. They knew about the complexities of my relationship with my family, the constant feeling that I was different from them and didn’t fit in. In some weird way, I felt legitimized in my conversation with them – I knew it all along.

After getting off the phone, I had to shake off my despair and pick up my kids from school.  My husband and I were scheduled to go to my business partner’s anniversary party that night.  Needless to say, I was not up to it.  I texted my business partner and just told her that a family issue came up and I couldn’t make it.  I should have come up with a better excuse, an illness or something, as of course she asked about it on Monday at work. I don’t know why I wasn’t better prepared, but I burst into tears and could barely get the story out.  I was mortified.  While I consider her a dear friend, we were working, and I wasn’t ready to share.  While she was so kind and thoughtful, I felt such a sense of shame in telling her.  Had I been less fragile that day, I would have come up with a little white lie.  I wasn’t ready to share, to own the story yet.

Now a year and a half later, I’d like to say I’ve made great strides in being able to talk about it.  In some ways, that is true – I even started this blog!  But, since those early days, I’ve only discussed it in person with my therapist (side note – I had not seen a therapist before this, but knew I needed to deal with this in a healthy way…it was the best thing that I did after learning the truth) and my Uncle S a year after the fact.  While this betrayal and the fallout has dominated my internal monologue, I rarely discuss it.  Why have I not shared with any other friends?  Why can’t I even tell my sister-in-law or my closest friends?  

I feel such a sense of shame even though I know that I did nothing wrong.  I am the victim of numerous lies and betrayals, not the perpetrator.  But, regardless of all the logic and rational thoughts, I still have that feeling in my gut of being ashamed, of being embarrassed. I constantly think to myself that I could be a perfect Jerry Springer Show guest.  Another reason is that I don’t have any answers yet.  Because my mom has not shared all the facts with me, I’ve been trying to figure things out on my own.  I feel that I am getting close, but until I know who my biological father is, I don’t want to share an unfinished story. 

It has been such an inspiration to read about the men and women who have come forward to discuss this with the public and have become advocates for our experience.  I am constantly impressed by their willingness to share and help us, whether by starting a Facebook group or creating a non-profit .  I am drawing strength from their examples and hope that I can be brave too.

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Home

The hardest thing to explain is just how pervasive the effects of this discovery have been.  Most people think it is just a change in what I knew about my biology.  Unfortunately it’s not that simple; it’s so much more complex and all encompassing. Unless you’ve experienced it, you don’t understand how the betrayal clouds not just your present, but also your history. Now when telling a childhood story or thinking about life as a kid, there’s always a shade to it, a question over my memory: what would it have been like if I had known the truth?  Was that a lie too?  Did that happen that way because my parents knew the truth? Would it have all unfolded that way?

One of the most surprising parts of this process has been how my feelings about my hometown seem to have changed.  I grew up near New Orleans and lived in the city for college and afterwards.  I then moved to California in my early 20’s for my career.  Since relocating, my identity has always been that of a transplanted southerner, the woman who misses Mardi Gras so brings king cake to her daughters’ school every year,  who makes gumbo every New Year’s day and still (even after 18 years in CA) addresses her casual emails to friends, “Hey y’all.”  But since my NPE revelation, even my joy at recollections of New Orleans that have nothing to do with my parents are tarnished.  Going to listen to Rebirth Brass Band at the Maple Leaf, eating po’boys, or hearing the clanging of the streetcar rolling past my first post-college apartment….they all seem gray now.  I feel a sad pang at these thoughts, rather than the warmth I used to feel. I often now think more about the underbelly, the other side of the region. While the New Orleans area has a reputation of being open, friendly, and accepting, it wasn’t always like that.  Now I identify it as the environment in which my mother felt she couldn’t be honest about her experiences as a young woman, the place in which she (or they) decided that living a lie was better than living the truth but potentially being ostracized.

Like so much of this situation, I now feel complexities around something that should be simple. Despite so many things being confusing and unclear, I do now have clarity around one thing: home.  Home isn’t where I’m from, it’s where I am now. Home is here, in this house with the family I have created. As I rebuild my identity, I am rebuilding it here, in California.  I am building new memories of family dim-sum lunches, of the foghorn and perfect fall days……and, maybe, still making gumbo on New Year’s day.

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Forgiveness

Over the past year and a half, I’ve struggled immensely with forgiveness.  I’ve always thought of forgiveness as a one-time thing, something linear:  someone wrongs you, they apologize to you,  you forgive them and everyone moves on.  I’ve since learned that it’s not that simple.  For me in this situation, it really is a process, a continuous loop that widens and contracts, often unpredictably.

Most days, I do feel as if I have forgiven my parents.  I don’t agree with what they (especially my mother) did, but I logically know that they did what they thought best based on their experiences.  My mother must have been very scared to have lied and kept it a secret for so long.  Maybe my dad only saw what he wanted to see, believe what he hoped to be true.

There are other days when I can feel my heart hardening, often out of nowhere. It can bloom from obvious sources, like a question from my daughter about our family tree, when filling out family medical history forms, or when a fictional movie character deals with a family betrayal.  It is harder when I am gobsmacked by the unexpected, even a year and a half later.  The other day when I was brushing my youngest daughter’s hair, she smiled at me in the mirror, flashing her single dimple and I felt like I was punched in the gut.  No one in my husband’s family has dimples, and no one on my mom’s side does either, so it’s like a flash reminder of the unknown, of the betrayal. I feel it settling in and I think that I can never forgive.

Now that time is passing and the wound doesn’t feel so fresh, I think I am spending more days in forgiveness than not.  And that has to be good enough for now.

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Rebuilding

One of the hardest things to explain to people is just how much something like this impacts your self identity.  When I’ve spoken to the few people I’ve opened up to about this, the first thing that many of them say is, “you’re still you; you’re who you always were.” It is hard to articulate why that just isn’t true. I don’t think you really understand unless you’ve been in this or a similar situation.

This is going to sound really cheesy and is a total cliche, but the best analogy I’ve been able to come up with is that of self identity as a house.  During your childhood, you build your foundation, primarily influenced by your parents. As time goes by, you frame the rooms, add a roof, paint, decorate, and furnish it to reflect your personality and experiences. Your house might not be perfect, but you love it and it’s familiar and comfortable.  All of a sudden, there is a major earthquake and you learn that your house was built on faulty foundation. The foundation was a lie, and crumbled into nothing. Because the entire house was built on a defective foundation, the walls buckle which causes the roof to cave in. All of your beautiful furniture is buried in the rubble. After mourning the loss of your beautiful home, what is there to do other than rebuild?  

For the past year and a half, I’ve really just been searching through the rubble to see what I can salvage, but now it’s time to get started on the rebuilding.  I am taking the time to create a really strong foundation. I’m searching for answers that will fill out a solid base, seismically sound. I’ll add extra support to those leaning walls and prop the roof back up.  I’ll reuse the furniture that survived and get new furniture to replace those pieces that didn’t.

This blog is helping me to rebuild.  I know no one will really see it or read it, but something just feels right about sharing my story, even if no one else sees it.


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Anger

I’ve been pretty angry lately.  It comes and goes, as unpredictable and variable as the weather.  One day I honestly feel as though I have forgiven my mother, both parents actually, and that I can move on from the betrayal.  Other days, the anger, resentments, and “what could have beens” feel so deeply rooted that I imagine it is a living part of me, as much as my eyes or skin.  I feel such a sense of loss, that every memory I have of my childhood, interactions with my parents and other family is now tainted.  It’s like the opposite of viewing it through rose colored glasses; like I am now viewing that history through grayness.  Memories now have a fog of questions enveloping everything.  

I’m angry that my parents lied to me for 41 years.  I’m angry that my mother still can’t or won’t be completely honest with me.  I’m angry that I no longer know who I am.  I’m angry that I am ashamed about something that I had no control over.  I’m angry that I can’t fill out a medical history form for me or my children with any sort of accuracy.  I’m angry that I feel guilty. I’m angry that I haven’t found forgiveness. 

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Waiting…

After a year of trying to put the pieces together of my shattered sense of self, I decided I was ready for some answers.  I confided in my Aunt D and Uncle S (my mother’s brother) and found out that they had always known.  This was both a relief and upsetting to me.  Since my mom and Uncle S were only 20 months apart in age, they had many common friends.  Apparently when she was pregnant, my mom told her ex-boyfriend (who was my uncle’s best friend, B) that I was his child. He denied the possibility due to the timing but there was always the underlying feeling within the extended family that I likely was his kid and that my father was a “good guy” for raising someone else’s child. My aunt however, had a different opinion. She had heard the history after marrying my uncle, but always had an alternate opinion as to my paternity. B was also dark, with dark hair, eyes, and skin; she just didn’t see any similarities.

Uncle S was friendly with his ex-girlfriend, J, and her brother, C, from that time and kept in touch over the years, including sharing holiday cards.  One year after their wedding, they received a card from C and his family. Aunt D was shocked to see it – apparently C’s daughter was my spitting image. She had no other reason to believe it, but she said she just knew when she saw it. Once I told them the story my mom had told me, Uncle S knew exactly what party she was talking about. He had not been there, but he knew that C was there and he didn’t know whether B was or not. Uncle S remembered that they had family members with the same last name as the one of the man, W, to which 23andme said were closely related.

Uncle S sent me a link to a church home page where C was now a pastor in NY.  The church page had a link to his Facebook page, and when I clicked it, it took my breath away.  I wasn’t sure if it was wishful thinking, but I swear I saw the nose and cheekbones I had always wondered about in his profile photo.  My husband said that I didn’t need any DNA proof, that the likeness was strong enough to be confirmation for him. After all the lies and assumptions, I knew that wasn’t enough for me.  I needed confirmation. I followed up with W and explained the situation. When he didn’t write back after a few weeks, I messaged him again, noting that I didn’t want to cause trouble. W wrote me back and noted that he had just lost his wife of over 50 years and didn’t want to get involved.  After digging into DNA %’s and relationships, I realized that he was likely my great-uncle and that I would have to follow up another way.

I did some Facebook “stalking” and saw that there was at least one Facebook relative of C’s that had the last name of the great-uncle.  In addition, I also a very close link in 23andme to a woman named AS. C was also Facebook friends with a woman of the same name. While everything told me that this was him, I needed confirmation.  I posted on a secret NPE* facebook support group about next steps, pondering how to get confirmation, and they suggested I try ancestry.com. Their pool of DNA profiles is larger and the group suggested that I would find closer relative matches there. So I submitted a sample there and am waiting for the results.  

*NPE is genealogical term that means “Non-Paternal Event” or event in a family tree in which an assume father is not a biological father. Now that this sort of thing is more visible due to the prevalence of at home DNA testing, many people use it to mean “Not Parent Expected.”

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Cause or Effect?

I always felt different, but now I wonder whether it was cause or effect? Was I treated differently because of what my parents suspected of my paternity or was I just different so I felt it? I was generally a happy kid.  I enjoyed school and had close friends. We didn’t have the money for me to have any real extracurricular activities, but I babysat and talked to my friends on the phone.  I was happy enough, but I always felt like something just wasn’t right.
When I got married, I easily shed my maiden name, having felt little connection to it and wanting to connect our future family with a name. This was even before I knew the truth.  I feel as though I am finally part of a family that I belong to, a family where I am me and am wholly accepted.

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My New Reality

Most of us take it for granted, it’s one of the first things that many of us know.  She is my mother and he is my father.  Before we know the language of DNA and genes, we know that I am from them – I get my eyes from momma or my laugh sounds like my daddy’s. The parental bond is the first and also the most important bond most of us experience until adulthood.  Helpless at birth, we rely on our parents to keep us safe, to nourish us, and to help us grow. Our initial world view is created through them and is the basis to which we build our sense of ourselves and the world.  As teenagers and young adults, we often rebel against that view, but it is the starting point for everything. So what happens when we find out that the basis for our entire understanding of the world and who we are is a lie? Is everything built on top faulty?  I’ve been slowly patching my battered sense of self and have been slowly turning my gaze from the rearview mirror. Like Japanese kintsugi, I am emerging stronger. The chips and cracks are being filled with gold, and I am rebuilding.

A couple of weeks after my 41st birthday, my world as I knew it changed forever.  Not just my present, but the lens with which I viewed my past had irrevocably shifted.  It caused me to question each and every event, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant.

I had submitted a DNA sample to 23andme many years ago, when they were a start-up focused on health based on DNA profiles.  The company later moved on to focus primarily on ancestry profiles, and I hadn’t paid much attention to that functionality until my husband started looking at his DNA ancestry profile.  I pulled mine up, and we got a good laugh – we joked that he was the purebread (99.8% Ashkenazi Jew) and I was the mutt (British, German, French, a little bit of everything). But when I clicked on the DNA relative tab, there was a man, WD, who was genetically a first cousin/great uncle that I had never met or heard of.  I asked my parents about him, they denied knowing him and said his last name didn’t sound familiar. I initially thought he might be related somehow through an uncle who maybe had a child he didn’t know about. I exchanged messages with him but when I told him who my parents were and tried to figure out the relation, I never heard back from him.  During this time, my siblings were interested in the results, they both submitted kits. That must have been what pushed my parents to tell me. I got a call from my mom, and she told me that the man that I thought was my dad was not my biological father. She said that she didn’t know who my biological father was, that he could be her ex boyfriend…or someone else. She then told me about going to a party when my dad was away in basic training and having too much to drink.  She said she blacked out and had some memories of having sex with “someone.” She said she never told anyone about that, including my dad. My dad was aware that I may be the biological daughter of her ex-boyfriend, but they both decided it wasn’t the case, as he was “dark” and I was a fair child. In 40 years, she had never told my dad about the party or the potential that I was someone else’s biological daughter (other than her ex-boyfriend’s). I had so many questions – who was this guy? How could they keep it from me for so long?  Who knew? But my mom had no answers for me. She either couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me any more details.

On the one hand, I felt shattered.  I had been lied to my entire life.  And it was a lie about something so core to everything I thought I knew about who I was.  I had over 40 years of history as me, but now I felt like I wasn’t who I thought I was.  Everyone says that DNA doesn’t make you who you are, but if the very basis of your self image is a lie, what does that mean for self identity?  

But on the other hand, this confirmed something I always knew.  Growing up, I never felt like I fit in my family. I had fine, straight light hair, with fair skin.  My siblings and parents all had thick, wavy, dark hair with olive skin. I was an academic who could spend hours curled up with a book, loved math and problem solving, and had a plan for college from the time I was a freshman in high school. Neither of my parents had gone to college and and neither of them nor my siblings had much interest in academics.  I always felt a place apart, as if I didn’t belong there. I constantly questioned it this difference. When I was in junior high and learned about the details of human gestation, I asked my mom how it was possible that I was born 2 weeks late and only weighed a little over 6 pounds. When I learned about blood types in 9th grade, I checked both parents blood types to see if it was possible they weren’t my parents (we were all O+).  Their life in denial continued.