Eight years of life as an NPE
Today’s guest post by Maggy gives readers an insight into one person’s life eight years after their discovery that the father who raised them was not biologically related. She first shared about her misattributed parentage experience with blog readers three years ago. You can read her first reflection here.
Have thoughts to share? Questions or comments for Maggy? Send them to us, and we’ll post updates to the blog with responses.
Reflections from Maggy
Eight years ago, when I first learned of my misattributed parentage, I was in shock and felt a number of conflicting emotions. Those first days were filled with highs and lows and research—so much research! On the one hand, I finally understood why I was so different from everyone else in my family, and that was a relief and a vindication of sorts. I was excited to learn about my biological paternal family and had very high hopes of meeting my father and siblings again. (They had all been in my life until I was 2 years old, though no one had any idea of our actual relationship.)
On the other hand, I was frustrated and angry. My mother had passed away three years prior, so I couldn’t confront her to ask about the circumstances of how I came about and why she’d never told me, since the man I thought was my father had died when I was 3 years old, and she knew how much I’d longed for a father. My biological father had also passed away while she remained quiet, ending my chances of ever meeting him. So much betrayal piled onto existing betrayal left me bitter and, for several years, all I could feel for my mother was anger.
The biggest issue I faced in the beginning was a loss of identity, which had always been solid, buoyed by endless stories of my ancestors’ voyages to the Americas in the 1700s and 1800s and their long treks west across the southern part of the United States. I had had such an interest in family history that I became the family historian, spending thousands of dollars on years of international Ancestry memberships and thousands of hours doing endless records searches. In fact, the month before my DNA discovery, I had designed and printed a book containing our family tree and many of our ancestors’ stories I had collected and had presented it to my family members, who were awed and wowed by the depth of my work.
Finding out after all the years believing, and after all that work I’d done, that those ancestors weren’t even mine was a huge blow. I felt like a vagrant holding on for dear life to the makeshift mast of a poorly built raft on a frothy, turbulent sea. I was lost and saw myself as a black sheep. The feelings I’d always had about being “other” were magnified a hundred fold and now—rather than just feeling “other” because I had different skills and proclivities than the rest of my family members—I felt “other” because I was. And worse, I was alone on that raft. There was no place left where I felt truly a part of an extended family.
In the eight years since, much has changed. After a couple of years getting to know and adore one of my brothers and all of my cousins, nephews, and nieces via email, text, and Facebook, I finally worked up the courage to meet them in person. My son and I travelled to Idaho to the yearly family reunion/party at my cousin, Danny’s, farm—an event that includes hundreds of their friends and two full days of musical performances, fun, and food. The reception we got was accepting and loving, and we were both immediately struck by the familiarity we felt with them on so many levels. Those skills and proclivities that had been so different from those displayed by the family I grew up with fit in perfectly with this new group—we spoke the same, felt the same politically and theologically, shared talents in music and writing, and shared many physical traits and mannerisms.
To tell the truth, the similarities were a bit shocking. I had never expected them to be so strong and across so many different aspects of our makeup. I had spent a lifetime believing that genetics (nature) was a factor, but that environment (nurture) had the greatest impact—I was wrong. In fact, in my case, nature had won out in creating who I became.
In the years since, we’ve all seen each other at least twice a year, for several weeks each time. One sister, who had originally balked at meeting me, finally came around a couple of years ago, and we’re now friends, and I finally met another sister virtually this summer. The rest of the family has completely accepted us—and we them—and we’ve become so close that we’re just family now; it’s as if we’ve always been family.
Sometimes I still have identity issues. Sometimes I still feel like the black sheep. (Because, really, when it comes down to it, I’ll always feel a little bit “other” no matter which family I’m talking about, because the circumstances of my birth are different, and I’m not fully part of the paternal family I thought I was part of, my step-paternal family, or my biological paternal family, and I’m certainly nothing like the maternal side of the family.) But my identity—which was torn down so quickly and thoroughly—has been rebuilt brick by brick over the years and is pretty solid.
I no longer identify as a child of early American immigrants on both sides of the family. Now, the core of who I am continues to recognize that on my maternal side but now accepts and celebrates that I am also the product of generations of intelligent, musically talented Ashkenazi Jews who came from Poland, immigrated to Germany, and eventually escaped Nazi Germany to immigrate to the United States just as WW II broke out, barely escaping death. (My father’s immediate family and the second cousins who sponsored their immigration are the only family members to have escaped the Nazi gas chambers.)
I am no longer angry at my mother. Do I still wish she’d told me the truth in time for me to meet my father? Yes. Do I still wish I could have asked her all those questions for which I desperately needed answers? Yes. But I have had time to understand what a bad position she was in and that she probably had a lot of angst built up regarding her decision to keep my parentage a secret. I strongly believe that she wanted to tell me in her final hours—I can still see her face and the way she looked at me with that tube down her throat—the desire to say something serious was there. She did not look at my sister and brother that way.
At some point, I finally took the family pictures of my father’s other children out of our family album and read what was written on the back. It was all right there. I could have found it at any time, and I know she did that for me. It was a risk—one she couldn’t face head on—but one she took anyway, so I believe she would have told me had I ever seen what was written there. (And how strange I’d never looked while she was alive. None of us did, though we’d always wondered why those pictures were in our album.)
So, after eight years, I am (mostly) at peace. My feet are solidly on the ground, and I really feel like I know who I am. I edited my father’s memoirs a few years back, adding pictures of the places and people he’d written about, and bound it into a book I’ve shared with my siblings and other relatives. Recently, I got to see a video of my father for the first time ever. It was profoundly moving to me, even though he was speaking German at the time, just to see him animated rather than being stuck looking at still photos. The sister I met virtually this summer shared with me an hour long audio of him telling all about his life, so I feel like I’m finally getting a bigger picture of who he was.
Each puzzle piece helps me put myself together a little more firmly. I’m so grateful that I took that DNA test in 2013. It changed me and who I think I am and gave me a stronger sense of self than I think I ever would have had otherwise. I consider myself so lucky to have such a large and extended loving family that includes my maternal family, my original paternal family, my step-paternal family, and my biological paternal family. To be loved and accepted by so many, without reservation, while having a more grounded sense of self, is a true gift and one I accept with complete gratitude and love.
Have thoughts to share? Questions or comments for Maggy? Send them to us, and we’ll post updates to the blog with responses.
What has been your experience with a DNA search or discovery? If you would be willing to share your story with readers of the Watershed DNA blog, please reach out to us. We can send you a few questions to help you get started and assist with editing so you feel good about the part of your story you share. No need to be a writer to participate!