There's Something Wonky in My Family Tree

Warning:  This is long and might be completely uninteresting.  It's also hard to make it make sense without visual aids, so it might be nonsensical.

tl;dr:  I think my great-great-grandfather was either adopted or someone else altogether.

New Match
I got a new match on 23andMe not too long ago -- a 2nd to 4th cousin, the site said.  Since the user name said TJCapello*, it became my closest actionable (i.e., non-anonymous and as yet unsolved) match on the site.  I sent him the default "let's share DNA info and see how we're related" message, but -- as expected -- I didn't get an immediate response.  His profile was new and contained no additional information.

I looked up the initials and refreshingly uncommon surname and, taking into account that he was male, I found his full name and location online with a quick Google search.  I started drawing up a family tree for him based predominantly on his mother's obituary on Legacy.com (but also using pipl.com, Facebook, FamilySearch, and Ancestry), and I was delighted to learn three out of the four of his grandparents were Italian immigrants.  I have only trace amounts of Southern European DNA myself and a tree filled with British and German names, so I focused my tree-building efforts on the non-Italian quarter of his ancestry. 

Then I got another new DNA match, even closer this time -- a 2nd to 3rd cousin, it said.  I quickly learned it was my previous match's sister (different surname, but Google knows all).  Whatever my relationship to her is, it's the same one I share with him, so I figured I should be able to find our most recent common ancestors in the great-great-great-grandparent range or even closer (thank you, ISOGG).

I built out the English-sounding quarter of the Capellos' family tree until it should have intersected with my own.  It even featured the surname Willis* like my own tree, and they lived in the Midwest, not far from another branch of my own family tree.  But I couldn't find any overlap, despite my own Willis branch of the family tree tracing back to the 1600s. 

I put this project aside for awhile, and I come back to it every so often.  This wouldn't be an easy one to solve like I had thought.  Either their family tree contains an error -- perhaps from an adoption or a non-paternity event -- or mine does.  Or maybe that mysterious branch of my family tree that ought to lead back to New York where my great-great-grandfather was born really doesn't.   

The Wonkiness
Recently I've started finding other DNA matches, on Ancestry this time -- all in Ancestry's "4th to 6th cousins" range, which tends to be a very loose estimate -- whose trees overlap with that same Willis branch that doesn't fit into my own.  I've found upwards of five matches whose trees overlap in the same place, making them all second and third cousins of the Capellos, though Ancestry hasn't put it together into a "hint" for me yet because I sometimes have to draw up the family trees myself based on less detailed trees or user names alone.  I appear to share about half as much DNA with those Ancestry matches as I do with the Capellos, which leads me to believe my family tree intersects with the Capellos' a generation more recently than it intersects with the others'.  But that leaves me confused.  Looking at their family tree, that means I'm descended from a Willis born in the early to mid-1800s.  I already have all those slots in my family tree filled.  I don't know how they could fit into my own tree.

That said, I don't believe any ancestor on my family tree is necessarily the right one until I have at least a couple separate (non-sibling) matches whose combined DNA and family trees support my data.  The more distant the ancestor, the less possible s/he is to confirm.  The more distant the cousin, the less possible s/he is to confirm.  I'm in contact now with some cousins so distant that the relationship doesn't even show up in our DNA anymore, and I only feel confident of the relationship because of overlapping family trees and mutual DNA matches within those same family trees. 

Logicking It Out
Here's the deal with the Willis branch of the tree in question:  It shows up in several reasonably close DNA matches' trees, so I assume it is how I'm related to them.  It's possible I'm wrong, but it's unlikely.  In order to fit it into my own tree however, something currently in my tree must be wrong.  First, I know the Willises are connected to my maternal side because my paternal uncle on Ancestry shares zero of those matches with me.  I also have enough known DNA matches at this point to draw the conclusion that several specific ancestors on my tree must be accurate.  I can verify my mother is my mother, I can verify her parents are my grandparents, and I can verify my great-grandparents too.  I have enough reasonably close DNA matches backing up my data that I feel confident about six of my eight maternal great-great-grandparents.  I even have an Ancestry "hint" that aligns another more distant cousin with ancestors of one of the two remaining great-great-grandparents (I feel less certain because it's only one match and a distant one at that).  That would leave Jack, my great-great-grandfather who supposedly came from New York. 

Jack is the brick wall of the mystery branch of my family tree.  I have no DNA matches to support him, and many hours of research have yielded no indication of who his parents were, which makes it exceptionally hard to find DNA matches that would support him.  His wife, my great-great-grandmother Emily, was from rural Illinois, within a 45-minute drive of the Willises.  According to census records, she was twenty years younger than Jack and had their first child -- my great-grandmother -- when she was 28.  They'd supposedly married two years earlier, but I have not been able to find a marriage record, though I found one for her first marriage easily enough.  Lots of my ancestors crossed state lines to marry though, so I'm not even sure where to focus my search.  Could Jack have been my great-great-grandfather but actually been adopted?  I would think this more likely if he didn't claim to have grown up in New York, over a thousand miles from the family to which I'm trying to connect him.  I could be wrong, but I don't think adoptees were moved that far from their birth families in the 1850s.  Could my great-grandmother have been a non-paternity event (NPE), meaning Emily was impregnated by someone who wasn't Jack?  If that is the case, I'm still not sure who my great-great-grandfather would be.  There isn't one specific "most likely suspect" in the Willis family tree, either based on DNA or based on relative age and geographic proximity.

Next Steps
My closest DNA match on Ancestry whose tree contains the Willis line has several matches in common with me.  A few of them also contain the Willis line, but several don't have detailed trees, nor are they related to the entire cluster of other Willis descendants, though they are related to each other.  My next step is to build family trees for the ones who don't have them yet, or whose trees only have a couple of names, which is most of them.  My hypothesis is that the ones who aren't mutual DNA matches with the Willis cousins will be related via an adjacent family line -- perhaps the Thompsons.  Thompson was the maiden name of my closest Willis cousin's great-grandmother.  If I'm right and they're connected via an adjacent family line, it would tell me which generation connects me to that family tree -- the generation containing both the Willises and the Thompsons (or whichever adjacent family surname) rather than an earlier generation.

In case you're wondering why I would put so much effort into something that matters so little, please understand THIS IS MY FAVORITE KIND OF PUZZLE.  I have been waiting for something like this to happen ever since I solved the "who is my biological father?" puzzle, which was at most a 4-star difficulty on Dell Logic Puzzles' 5-star scale.  I find few things as gratifying as solving logic-based puzzles, and solving this one will create an even bigger hint toward solving other genealogical puzzles, of which there are two more I've been working on for months.  I've written about Aida, but there is another one I haven't even mentioned yet (she self-identifies as Cherokee, but her DNA is 99% European), and the solution to this Willis puzzle will help me towards solving both of them via deductive reasoning.  In short, I'm doing this for fun.

*Not his actual name.

On Not Fitting In

I watched a documentary on Amazon Streaming the other day (free with Prime) called "Adopted."  It follows two different stories:  an adult Korean-born woman who was adopted into a white American family at the age of 4 months, and a white American couple in the process of adopting a baby girl from China.

I like reading blogs and watching documentaries that feature adoptees.  While my brother Dante is the only adoptee I've been close to, we were never close enough to talk about it.  I knew almost nothing about adoption before I found my biological father.  What I think interests me most about adoption -- or, more accurately, adoptees -- is that, while it's distinctly different from my donor conception, a lot of adoptees and donor conceived people seem to share a lot of the same feelings of genetic bewilderment, wanting to know where they came from, and wanting people to stop telling them they should be grateful to be alive. 

I know a fair number of donor conceived people who feel adoption is different primarily because the children exist before the "intended parents" find them, unlike in donor conception, but the more I read, the more I believe children (and often mothers) are commodified in adoption just like in donor conception.  Most adopted children are not actually "saved" from some unspeakable fate (though some people like my mother like to tell them they were).  The bigger difference, as far as I can see, is not between intent but between how many biological ties are broken at birth, and in some cases of donor conception and surrogacy, all biological ties are broken just as in a typical adoption.  Lines start to blur.  We have a lot in common.  There are very few blogs by donor conceived people that have been updated in recent years, so I read adoptee blogs and breathe a sigh of relief that someone else gets it.  Someone more daring than me is blogging the outrage I'm afraid to show.

I enjoyed the "Adopted" documentary.  I don't share much in common with Jennifer, the Korean-American adoptee, but I related to her.  She grew up with white parents who had been raised "not to see race" and refused to recognize that she was any different from them, as well as classmates who mocked her for her physically Asian qualities.  As I've heard many transracial adoptees say, she felt white.  She wanted her outsides to match her insides.  She wanted blue eyes and blond hair and felt somewhat bewildered looking into the mirror as she grew up.  As a white donor-conceived woman who has experienced this phenomenon -- aspects of my face and body looking "off" because I can't place them in the context of my family, long before I knew this was a phenomenon that existed -- I can only imagine how Jennifer must have felt.  As she got older and attended a high school where she wasn't the only Asian student, she tried to pass as a "real Asian" since her new friends wouldn't immediately know she hadn't been raised in an Asian family.  When she reached adulthood, she even moved to Korea for a time, but still she did not fit in.  In Korea, where she'd been born, she was too American.

My best friend Jerry and I were talking about "Adopted" when she mentioned the fact that no one ever feels like they fit in -- that the very idea of fitting in is a fantasy that only makes people sad, like finding the meaning of life or finding one's soulmate.  While I agree with her to a certain extent, I think there are different levels of Not Fitting In that we experience.  I don't feel like I fit in most places or with most people -- I think I'm pretty common in this -- but I've got this Great White Halloween Costume I wear everyday that usually makes it look like I do.  I think my problem is less serious in part simply because it's less visible.  I don't expect everyone with "costumes" like mine to feel that way, but blending in has always meant a lot to me.  I've been in situations in which I stood out uncomfortably because of my race, and I've been in situations (most situations) in which I blended, and having the option to blend in simply by changing my clothes or hair or behavior -- whether or not I feel like I fit in -- makes a pretty huge difference.  This is only one of the struggles facing transracial adoptees, and it didn't even occur to me it existed until I started reading blogs in which people talk about it.

A lot of parents take their children's life challenges as personal insults.  As a parent, I get that.  It's annoying though, both for parent and child.  It makes parents defensive and children either angry or overprotective of their parents' feelings or both.  It creates an unhelpful barrier to communication.  Jennifer wanted validation from her adoptive parents, who she loved and cherished and cared for both physically and financially, but they seemed to treat her problems as a transracial and transnational adoptee as made up problems she'd invented to garner attention and pity.  What did she want them to do about it now?  They'd done the best they could.  They'd been raised not to see race and they never saw her as any different from them.  How could she ask for any more than that?  And these were good parents.  Loving, adoptive parents. 

I got the impression what might have helped was if they'd recognized that any daughter who loved them and cared for them as much as theirs always had was not baring her soul to hurt them.  She loved her parents and wanted to feel seen by them in her entirety.  She wanted them to understand and love her for all of who she was, and that included being Korean and an adoptee and not just a chameleon who could and would change who she was to gain their approval.  I get that.  I'm a chameleon too.  I think it might have meant a lot if they'd said, "I had no idea.  I'm sorry you've felt so much pain.  I did the best I could, and it's hard to hear you felt this way, but I understand that you didn't have the words to express these feelings earlier.  Thank you for trusting me with this now.  I've always loved you as my daughter, and it didn't occur to me that you might still feel adopted or want to know about where you came from.  Is there anything I can do to help?"  Empathy is important.  Validation is 50% of every cure. 

Bright Side

If you don't yet know the identity of one or both of your genetic parents, and you don't yet have life insurance, consider buying a life insurance policy in 2016.  The forms generally ask for family medical history, and if you don't know yours, your life insurance can actually be a tad cheaper than it would be if you knew just how sick your biological family really is.  I got life insurance between finding out I'm donor conceived and finding out who my biological father is, and my family medical history for those forms was half the length it is now that I've found him.  It's called "plausible deniability."  Might as well force something useful out of parental anonymity.  Happy New Year's Eve, Everybody!

My Adopted Brother

Dante's adoption anniversary is the anniversary of the day our parents -- my mother and social father -- finalized his adoption in court.  He was two months old and had lived with our parents since he was strong enough to leave the hospital.   

Every year we celebrated Dante's anniversary by going out with our mother's extended family -- our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and many cousins -- first out for lunch at Pizza Hut and then to a movie or the bowling alley and ice skating rink.  I loved spending the day with my cousins, almost all of whom were local and spent every major holiday with us, including nearly a dozen family birthday parties throughout the year.  But I was jealous that Dante had an anniversary and I didn't.  It was almost like getting a second birthday party every year, even if there weren't presents.  I was jealous of Dante a lot, any time he got something I didn't, any time I felt things weren't equal.  I think that's a pretty typical kid reaction to perceived unfairness.

When my mother told me I was donor conceived and immediately told me I could never tell another soul, including my dad or Dante, it cast Dante's adoption anniversary in a weird light for me.  Why was his adoption, or the fact that our parents weren't biologically related to him, deserving of a party, while what I saw as a similar facet of my own identity -- being biologically descended from a secret parent outside our family -- was a dark secret?  It didn't seem fair at all.

In hindsight, I think my mother was just doing what had she had been told to do (except for the telling me I am donor conceived part).  Tell adopted children where they came from (to the extent that you know).  Celebrate them.  Tell them they are "special" and "chosen."  That was where adoption had gotten to when Dante was born.  Never tell children they are donor conceived.  Never tell anyone where the donor conceived children came from.  If anyone knows the truth, the intended father will reject the child and the child won't respect him as its parent.  That was where donor conception had gotten to when I was born.  "For god's sake, tell your child," has been the prevailing wisdom since the '90s, but when I was conceived, secrecy was king.  Adoptions used to be dark secrets too, so it seems to me the prevailing wisdom of "what to tell the children" is a couple decades behind for donor conception simply because it's a newer phenomenon. 

It seemed bizarre to me to treat us so differently when the goal was apparently to treat us both "as their own children."  But the prevailing wisdom of the day was dramatically different for our individual circumstances, no matter how similar those circumstances appeared in my mind.  Secret parents.  God knows how many siblings.  Falsified birth certificates.  The wondering.  The perpetual unknown.  His unknown was twice as big as mine, but my secret was darker.  It seemed we had a lot in common, but I wasn't allowed to tell him so.

I'm not jealous of Dante anymore, or of the fact that he got an extra annual party.  I'm not even sure he liked those parties.  He never talked to me or our parents about being adopted or how he felt about it.  It might have meant nothing to him or he might have been broken up inside.  There was no way to know because we weren't close.  We weren't close, and our house wasn't a safe place to talk about such things.  Had he dared to bring up the topic of his birth parents, even if it was just to express a curiosity in who they were, I can only imagine how our mother would have retaliated.

I can only remember my mother bringing up the topic of Dante's birth parents in my presence two times.  I remember her telling Dante that his mother had been 15 and was impregnated by a man whose children she had been babysitting.  I don't know if any of this was true, nor if it was "consensual," to the extent that sex with a 15-year-old can be consensual.  It struck me as a way for my mother to tell Dante that she was better than his birth parents.  Period.  The "slut" insinuation was there.  I'd like to say I imagined it, but as far as I could tell, my mother tended to view any sexually active woman as a slut who "had it coming," even if she was a child or married.  The only other time I remember my mother mentioning Dante's birth parents was once when he wanted money for something in his teens or early twenties.  She'd sneered at him, "Why don't you go find your REAL parents?  Maybe they'll have some money for you."  It had the desired effect of shutting him up.

I remember once prattling away in the living room as a child and accidentally saying "my mom" instead of just "Mom."  Dante and our parents were the only people to whom I called her "Mom" instead of "my mom," so it seemed like a natural slip up to me, but my mother cut me off and laid into me.  "How dare you?" she screamed.  "I'm as much his mother as I am yours!"  I'd never thought she wasn't.  She'd favored Dante for most of my life.  When he hadn't recently done something to prompt her to turn on him viciously, he was the one she chose for her team while I was left out in the cold with our dad.  I knew how things worked at our house.  I hadn't been trying to insinuate that the only brother I'd ever known wasn't a part of our awful family.  He'd been a part of it for longer than I had.  Still she blanketed me in shame.  It feels strange to feel so sure I had made an innocent slip of the tongue with no deeper meaning behind it and to also feel so deeply ashamed for it.  Maybe that's what good parents are supposed to do though -- defend their children against the perceived slights of others.  It was confusing whenever I became one of those "others."

I wish Dante had known I was donor conceived.  I don't believe it's harder than being adopted (or even as hard most of the time, depending on the family and the surrounding circumstances -- half the unknown = half the trouble?), but it's another way of being different, of being "other."  It's something we sort of had in common.  We don't relate to each other at all, and yet I imagine he must've felt like as much of an outsider in that house as I did.  I felt like an outsider years before I knew I was donor conceived.  I remember being in preschool and thinking I must've been secretly adopted.  I thought I had both a mom and a dad out there in the world somewhere -- people who would understand me and make everything make sense.

I wish Dante knew that I wasn't as favored or as belonging as he seemed to think I was.  As jealous as I was of him (sometimes childishly, sometimes with good reason), I could see that he was treated unfairly, especially by our dad.  And that, as often as our mother gave him an undeserved pass on his bad behavior, she sometimes said terrible things he didn't deserve either.  Did he ever see when I was treated unfairly?  Did he recognize how hard I tried to keep them happy?  Did it ever occur to him that his abuse made my life harder and scarier?  Could he care? 

I wish he knew that it wasn't always just him on the outside being mistreated like he seemed to think.  Nothing there was fair, and neither of us was the full-time golden child.  If he hadn't been a psychopath, we might have been friends.  It would have been nice to have a friend in that house.

Dante is still in that house.  I almost said "stuck in that house," but I suspect that's not how he sees it.  Every time he left -- usually because our mother had kicked him out -- he gravitated back.  When she finally moved out after the divorce, when he was in his mid-thirties, he left his apartment and independent adult life to move back into his childhood bedroom.  Why?  He brought his girlfriend and her son with him, but still, why?  Why would anyone live in that awful, dilapidated house by choice?  And now he lives there with our dad, the person who always treated him the most cruelly.  I don't envy Dante anymore.  He might be happier than me -- I honestly have no idea -- but I could never live the way he lives.  We are too different.  I have never been able to understand him. 

I don't know what effect being adopted has had on him.  No ones knows.  There isn't a "control" version of Dante who isn't adopted with whom to compare him.  I don't know how he might or might not have been different had he been raised by his birth mother, or by more functional adoptive parents for that matter.  This post isn't really about that.  I guess what I mean for it to be about is that you can't predict how someone will feel about being adopted or react to being adopted, and I don't think there is a way to undo the fact that someone is adopted simply by throwing them a party and calling them "special."  And just because you love an adopted family member like they're blood and treat them like blood and genuinely feel like they're your flesh and blood doesn't mean they don't still feel adopted (or donor conceived, as the case may be).  And that's okay.  It'll be more okay if you can let them feel it without taking it personally or trying to make them feel something else.  That's what I think anyway.  I can't speak for anyone else.

The DAR and Cultural Identity

I have craved a cultural identity since I was a young child.  I relished movies about people with strong cultural ties, such as "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and "Pocahontas" and I really want to think of a third one that isn't "Schindler's List" but every example I think of is more culturally insensitive than the last.  I grew up in a white, Midwestern town where our grasping at cultural identity was probably a large part of what led people to genealogy.  It's what led me to mine.

My interest in the Daughters of the American Revolution began when I thought I'd never know the identity of my biological father.  My social father's mother had been very interested in her own genealogy, and I have a framed family tree she drew that includes pencil sketches of a few generations of her ancestors.  They aren't my ancestors, but no one else in her family seemed to want it, and she's a talented artist.  It seemed less weird to have it hanging on my dining room wall when I thought it was the only paternal family I'd ever know. 

I decided to trace my dad's family tree on Ancestry.com since his mother had given me a decent start.  I remembered another family tree she had drawn up that traced her American ancestors back to the 1600s.  I thought maybe I could join the DAR.  If there was going to be institutionalized lying on my birth certificate, I wanted at least to be able to use it to gain entry to a club where I didn't belong.

In case you aren't aware, the DAR is an American group for ladies over the age of 18 who can trace their direct lineage to someone who aided America in the fight for independence.  By "trace," they mean you have to produce birth, marriage, and death certificates for everyone in your direct line back to the ancestor in question.  Most states didn't keep such records until about a hundred years after the Revolutionary War, so that can be a tricky feat.  Fortunately, if a more immediate ancestor is already a member of the DAR -- such as your mother or grandmother -- you only have to prove your lineage back to that person.  Very convenient for maintaining the status quo.  DNA evidence doesn't count as proof nor is it accepted, so no one really knows how many of the members actually descended from patriots biologically and not just legally, or how many meet the bloodline criteria but are excluded because of an ancestor being adopted or born out of wedlock.

I think my dad's mom tried to join the DAR at one point.  When I found a "patriot" in her tree and looked him up in the DAR's patriot database, there was a note explicitly stating that the there was no certifiable proof that the daughter from whom my grandmother descended was legally his child.   

Now that I've done more genealogical research on my own family tree, I've found I'm descended from at least half a dozen "patriots" on my maternal grandfather's side.  While I find a club based around purity of blood rather distasteful and assigning yourself value based on who you were born to rather sad (especially in my case), the DAR still sings its siren song for me.  I crave acceptance and belonging.  Also, "I'm off to my DAR meeting," is one of the WASPiest things a person can say, and I've striven to be WASPier since adolescence.

In case you aren't aware, a WASP is a White Anglo Saxon Protestant, but it has a connotation of snobby old money and power, which is what I find appealing about the term.  I was born white, of mostly British descent, and Methodist, so I'm a WASP in the most literal sense, but I was raised as White Trash.  It's a very different subculture.  We kept a totaled car in our driveway when I was growing up.  My brother has a gun collection.  My grandpa used the "n" word at Thanksgiving dinner.  I don't get jokes about "double-wide trailers" because my uncle lived in one and it was a hell of a lot nicer than the house where I grew up, not to mention TWICE AS WIDE as his previous trailer.  It's a very different subculture.

As I drew up my family tree over the last year, it seemed my DAR dreams would be quashed by the fact that my maternal grandfather was "illegitimate."  I had no idea what name he'd had at birth because his parents weren't married, and his siblings were all half-siblings with different surnames.  Every census since his birth had listed them all under a different surname -- that of whomever their mother had most recently married, even though there was never a man in the house come census time.  I couldn't find evidence my grandfather had even existed under his father's surname before he enlisted in the army for WWII, so I didn't know how to request a copy of his birth certificate. 

Then a couple of weeks ago it occurred to me to try.  I knew his birth date and his mother's maiden name and the city where he was born.  Maybe that would be enough.  I used the only legal name under which I knew him and included his father's name for good measure.  It worked.  It turns out Wilkes -- his father's last name -- was always his last name.  And his father's name was on his birth certificate too.  Where my grandfather and I come from (and maybe across America -- I'm not sure), the mother's husband is automatically the legal father, whether he is present for the birth or not.  If the mother is unmarried and no father is present to sign his name to the birth certificate, the father line unceremoniously reads "bastard."  I'm not sure if this is still how things are done, but it's how they were done when my grandpa was born in the 1920s.

My grandpa's father wasn't present for his birth.  I know this because the line of the birth certificate where it asks for his last known address reads, "Unknown -- Abandoned Wife."  Perhaps it's true.  Perhaps they were married, in spite of the fact that there is no marriage license registered for them in the county where they both lived or anywhere else I have looked and in spite of the fact that my grandmother's letters made it sound like they weren't.  (Or perhaps Michael is right and "Abandoned Wife" was the name of his hometown in Kentucky.)  But I think it's equally likely my great-grandmother didn't want to have "bastard" written on her son's birth certificate.  And I think that was a solid move on her part.  I have great respect for people willing to lie for a good cause, and in this case, my great-grandmother was able to convey more truth on her son's birth certificate than the word "bastard" ever would have.  

Being DC: They Won't Understand

Back before I found my biological father, I posted my story anonymously on a fairly large website.  Because apparently it sometimes pops up when people do a Google search for "I just found out my father was an anonymous sperm donor" or similar, I have had the honor of being the first donor conceived person some other DC adults have contacted.  Based on those exchanges, there are some things I want to make sure every donor conceived person knows, especially those donor conceived people who haven't yet met another donor conceived person or gotten a chance to talk about how they feel about being donor conceived.  If you fall into any part of those categories, this is for you.

The first thing is that, while not everyone feels the same way about being donor conceived, most people have feelings about it, and that's normal.  If you're bewildered or crying yourself to sleep or spending hours every night trying to find information on who your anonymous biological father and half-siblings might be, or even if you aren't, you're normal.  You haven't done anything wrong.  You aren't crazy, you aren't weak, and you aren't a bad child to the parents who raised you simply because you want to know more or because the revelation of your parentage blew your mind.  You're reacting in a normal fashion to some mind-blowing news.  That's not to say therapy would be out of the question to help you deal with this news -- I advocate therapy for pretty much everybody because I love the simple elegance of paying someone to listen to me rant -- but you're still normal.

The second thing I want DC people to know is this:  people who aren't donor conceived will not understand.  I am surprised this is the case, and I will grant you my evidence is only anecdotal, but it has been the case with everyone I know.  EVERYONE.  My longtime best friend Jerry is the kindest, most empathetic person I've ever met, and she still doesn't get it.  That's not to say talking about it with her isn't still helpful -- talking with her is always helpful -- but the most she can empathize with my situation is to say, "I don't get it.  I know it's important to you and a big deal to you, and I can only assume I might feel the same way in your position, but I don't understand why it matters."  Jerry grew up with two biological parents (one great, one balls to the wall crazy) and a biological sister who is one of her best friends.  When I wanted to write to my biological father to introduce myself and to ask if he'd tell my half-siblings about me, she didn't think I should do it.  She knew he was unlikely to want anything to do with me, so she didn't see the point in reaching out at all -- and that's a normal reaction.  If an empathetic person who is close friends with her parent and sister doesn't understand the allure of possibly meeting new family, who will?

My therapist had essentially the same response as Jerry.  So did my husband.  These are good and kind people with no personal skin the game that they're trying to protect.  They just don't get it, and I know it's not because they don't try or don't care.  I think it's just too foreign a concept for people outside that situation to relate to.  Parentage seems like it shouldn't matter.  I get that.  Why does it matter?  I don't know.  I could name twenty reasons it matters to me, but I can't convince someone else that my reasons are valid.  That seems to be one of the big strikes against rights to information for donor conceived people.  We can't prove that it matters.  For most people in this kind of situation though -- donor conceived people, adopted people, people who have no idea who one or both of their parents are for whatever reason -- it matters.  Even if a person doesn't want to get to know that parent, not being allowed to know who they are usually matters.  Not having a choice in getting to know them matters.  There are too many people who feel the same way I do for you to convince me these feelings are wrong.

This is why I think it's important for donor conceived people to be in contact with other donor conceived people.  They will be able to relate in ways even the best friends and family can't.  You'll see the whole spectrum of attitudes and feelings a person can have toward being donor conceived (it's pretty wide, and I suspect a lot of the quiet majority sits near the middle), and you'll see that you're normal.  I don't post on any DC online groups, but I do read some of them.  It makes me feel normal (thank you, PCVAI and Worldwide Donor Conceived People Network -- please note these are groups exclusively for donor conceived people, not for parents of the donor conceived as most websites are, which makes for a very different atmosphere).  As much as I feel like a bit of an outsider pretty much anywhere I lurk, I feel an unusual sense of belonging in these groups.  People often disagree, but there is a sense of mutual respect and understanding that I appreciate.

My Mother's Oral Family History

I have always known who my biological mother is.  She was the same mother who raised me.  But finding out about her family history was harder than finding my biological father.  I haven't found a single person in her family interested in genealogy but me, and our family is full of secrets that we only know from oversharing.

I grew up within a mile of my maternal grandparents and saw them at least once a week for the first eighteen years of my life.  There were certain things I grew up knowing, stories I grew up hearing over and over again, but they were specific and limited.  I knew my grandmother had had ten pregnancies in eleven years.  I knew my only biological aunt had died of SIDS on Christmas Eve and that my then 3-year-old mother had tormented her own mother with the persistent question, "Where is my baby?" for weeks afterward.  I knew my mother had been named after her own maternal grandmother, and that her grandmother had hated her own name so much that she'd gone by her middle name nearly all her life.  These were some of the facts my mother recited to me regularly, just like the story of my birth (I "ripped [her] from end to end") and of my brother's adoption ("she called and said, 'Do you want a peanut?' A peanut is what they called premature babies.")  They were her oral history, and they are embedded in my brain.

I knew my grandmother had gotten married at age fifteen because she wanted to run away from home, but I didn't know she had been running away from her "wicked stepmother."  I knew her own mother had married at fourteen and lost custody of my then 2-year-old grandmother when she became a teenage divorcee, but I didn't know my great-grandfather's name or that he was a college graduate, unlike anyone else in my family for the next 75 years.  Grandma's maiden name was Adams, or Addams* -- I didn't know which -- and my mother hated my great-grandfather for taking Grandma away from her mother.  He "didn't like girls," my mother told me when I asked why Dante had been invited to meet him and I hadn't.  I knew he'd written and self-published a memoir that my mother claimed was a catalogue of his sexual exploits, but I didn't know the name of the book, and I didn't know that he lived within a half-hour's drive of my home for over a decade of my childhood.  I didn't know he was the only person in my family to live to the age of ninety, or that he'd died within a year of "the love of his life," my Grandmother's longtime stepmother.  I didn't know they had given my grandmother a half-sister, who had finished college but who hadn't been able to bear children of her own.  She has an adopted daughter close to my age who has a graduate degree.  They're both on Facebook now.  She looks like a younger, healthier, more affluent version of my grandmother. 

I've mentioned before how my cousin helped me with my search for maternal family by providing old letters our grandmother had sent her.  Our grandmother used to write letters once a week to pretty much everyone she knew who lived out of state.  My cousin had kept several years worth of Grandma letters.  She pulled them out of storage at my request.  She said they shared too much information, that she wouldn't be comfortable rereading them if Grandma had still been alive.  They read more like private journal entries than something you would say to a granddaughter.  Those letters also held names and dates I hadn't absorbed from my mother's oral history.  They gave me search terms, and the knowledge my mother had embedded in my brain filled in the blanks.  My cousin didn't know the things I knew -- even our great-grandmother's first name -- so I was able to fill in some blanks for her too. 

I assume my great-grandmother's first pregnancy ended in miscarriage because she got married at the age of fourteen and didn't give birth to my grandmother until over a year later.  I learned these dates from documents on Ancestry.com.  She got divorced in the 1930s at the age of 18 and lost custody of my grandmother to her ex-husband.  My great-grandfather left my then 2-year-old grandmother with his parents and moved on.  My great-grandmother spent time in the Deep South, though neither I nor my cousin knows why.  My grandmother's letters made it sound like purgatory.  My grandmother lived with her own grandparents until she was eight.  She became close with her father's only sister, whose name I recognized because my grandmother had visited her every week at her nursing home until she died in the 1990s.  At the age of eight, my grandmother moved in with her newly remarried father and the woman she referred to in letters as her "wicked stepmother."  Her father called her the love of his life.  My grandmother wasn't happy there.  As I mentioned earlier, she ran away at the age of fifteen to marry my grandfather.  She didn't know how to cook, and she never learned how to drive.  Neither of them finished high school.  They eloped on my grandfather's birthday, allegedly to distract the court registrar out of asking for proof of my grandmother's age.  It apparently worked.  Their marriage license lists her age as 18.  My eldest uncle was born ten months later.

I've found my great-grandparents' headstones.  My great-grandmother remarried at least once, but she survived her final husband, so even her death certificate doesn't list his full name.  My mother told me she died of stomach cancer, but her death certificate cites cardiac arrest.  I've learned that death certificates list whatever catalyst literally killed the person that day and will never say what led to what killed them, like cancer or diabetes or blunt force trauma.  I come from a long line of ladies who battled their weight, and my great-grandmother relished the easy weight loss that came with dying of stomach cancer.  One of the few pictures I've seen of her shows her svelte figure standing with both legs inside one leg of pants, demonstrating that she was half her previous size and delighted by it. 

My grandmother's aneurism created the same effect.  The weight melted off when she spent months on a liquid diet, unable to swallow most food without choking.  She recovered though and was unhappily battling her weight again by the time she died some fifteen years later.  One of my last memories of her was of visiting her and my grandpa's duplex and witnessing one of her daily weigh-ins.  She had gained weight and was disappointed.  She was in her seventies. 

Mental illness was my mother's best diet.  She lost around eighty pounds when she stopped eating or drinking or getting up from the couch in her early fifties.  She was pleased with the effect and bragged to me over the phone in the days leading up to my wedding.  It was the thinnest she had been since before I was born.  She commandeered one of my dad's old wheelchairs because she had grown too weak to walk.  When I saw her next, she had aged twenty years.  Her formerly thick brown hair was sparse and grey, and the skin hung loose from her face and neck like wax dripping from a candle.  She reminded me of Emperor Palpatine.

My grandfather's lineage was much harder to trace because his parents were never married or lived together, and he never spoke about either of them.  I met one of his half-siblings once as a child, but it turns out there were at least six more.  More on Grandpa next time.

The Great Clean Out of '88 (or The Time My Mother Thought Her SIL Would Leave Her Three Children in Her Will)

When I was in elementary school, I learned that my Aunt Janie had a brain tumor.  She was my aunt by marriage, but since she married Uncle Charles long before I was born, all I really understood was that she was my aunt and she was my cousins' mother.  Uncle Charles -- my mother's brother -- had committed suicide when I was a baby, so Aunt Janie had been raising my cousins on her own for a number of years when we found out about the brain tumor.

I don't remember if there was a time when we thought Aunt Janie might survive.  As I recall, my mother told me she was dying and not to say something crass like "get well soon" because she was never going to get better and was going to be dead soon.  I think the doctors had given her six months to live.  That was how long I knew about it anyway.  My cousins were in middle school and high school at the time, and my mother made an effort to get the youngest out of the house as much as possible.  She was one of my favorite cousins and always nice to me, despite being several years my senior, so I was delighted to get to spend time with her.  My mother told me she was trying to get my cousin out of the house so she could take her mind off her mother dying and so Aunt Janie could rest. 

The Great Clean Out started shortly thereafter.  We were clearing out the basement so that it could finally be finished.  My mother told my dad, my brother Dante, and me that she would be adopting my three cousins when Aunt Janie died, and we needed to get the basement finished to make room for them all.  In hindsight, it seems odd I don't remember my dad making any kind of fuss about this huge decision to more than double the number of kids in the house.  But then again, he has always seemed to prefer to let her do whatever she wants and then complain about how badly everything is going and how none of it is his fault.

My mother ordered a large dumpster that sat on our front lawn, and we spent every weekend for I don't remember how long hauling garbage and debris up the stairs and out of the house.  Dante and Dad and I fantasized about what else we'd do with all the space.  Everyone wanted new bedrooms.  Dante and I each tried to lay claim to my dad's master bedroom on the ground floor when he said he'd be moving downstairs, but Mom overruled us and said it would be hers.  She'd moved back and forth between sleeping on the living room couch and the lower bunk bed in Dante's room for as long as I'd been alive.  Dad was going to have a soundproof music studio in the basement too, he said.  In my imagination, the windowless finished basement was bright and clean in a way our cave-like, hoarded ground floor home had never been.

My parents had never gotten a sump pump installed, in spite of the basement flooding every time it rained and the house allegedly having been built on a spring.  Eventually the deeper slantings of the basement held a full inch of standing water on any given day.  It became dangerous for my dad to use his elevator -- a forklift with half-walls constructed years ago by his own father -- because the floor of it submerged into the dark water before touching down.  The only wheelchair-accessible shower in the house was in that basement, in spite of the fact that my parents had had the home custom built to be accessible.

There was visible mold on most of the things that had been stored down there.  Dante and I wore leather work gloves as we lugged enormous amounts of wet cardboard and paper up to the dumpster.  My dad mostly sifted through moldy old books and papers while my mother "sorted," supervised Dante and me, and occasionally loaded the elevator with full file boxes too heavy to carry up the stairs. 

I didn't like cleaning out the basement.  It wasn't an enjoyable way to spend my weekends as a first-grader, but I was thrilled about the idea of having a newly finished, clean home and a new bedroom and not one but THREE new siblings.  It was like a whole new life.  The promise of what was going to be was enough to keep me cleaning and hauling.  Besides, I was seven -- I had no choice.

This went on for at least a couple of months.  Shortly before Aunt Janie's death, my mother learned that Aunt Janie's parents were moving into her home to take care of my cousins.  My mother was upset.  She had wanted to adopt my orphaned cousins, and now she couldn't, and it sounded like she was never even considered.  She seemed jealous.  She seemed angry.  The time was close enough to my aunt's death that I think my mother might have actually expected to be left the children in her will with no advance conversation about it.  Lots of movies she liked played out this way.  Baby Boom comes to mind.  She really loved Baby Boom.  In hindsight, I think a primary reason she took my cousin out so often was as a means of throwing her hat in the ring as the future guardian.  Aunt Janie had started declining her offers near the end.  She said she wanted to spend more time with her kids.

I was a bit disappointed that I would not, in fact, be getting new siblings, but my disappointment was outweighed by a sense of how good a plan they had in place.  My cousins wouldn't have to move.  They wouldn't have to change schools.  They would be cared for by their grandparents, who I could safely assume already knew them better than my parents did.  Losing their mother would be the only massive adjustment they'd have to undertake.  Even as a 7-year-old, I could tell this plan was much better than having anyone else adopt my cousins.

My mother immediately called a halt to the clean out.  There was no point anymore, she said.  I wanted to continue.  I thought having a fixed up home for ourselves to live in counted as a point, but I was seven. 

We never even got close to having the basement cleared, and there was no plan to work on the ground floor at all.  In hindsight, I think non-hoarders could have cleared that basement in a weekend since everything down there had become moldy, soaked garbage, but I don't think it would have mattered.  My parents avoided having work done on the house whenever possible, and to this day there is still no sump pump.  My dad still doesn't have a handicapped-accessible shower on the ground floor either.  The place is still infested with mold, not all the exterior doors close all the way, there has been a known but unaddressed termite problem since the '90s, and most of the electrical work is shot.  My dad still talks about fixing up the house with a five-figure government grant for which he supposedly qualifies, but he has no desire to get a sump pump installed because "that would cost hundreds of dollars."  The last photo he sent me was of one of his new "collections."  There was still hoard in the background that he probably doesn't even see anymore. 

Goodness of Fit

When I got pregnant with my daughter, I wondered what she would be like.  I wondered what she would look like, what she would be best at, what she would enjoy.  I had no preconceived notions about who she might be.  I was so different from my own parents that I knew she could be anyone.

People in the parenting realm often cite "goodness of fit" when discussing how well a parent and child get along.  The idea is that you might unintentionally favor one of your children over the other because you have the same temperament or the same hobbies, while the other might function as a sort of stranger in your home.  I don't know how well my adoptive brother, Dante, and I fit with our parents.  It didn't seem like any of us fit well, but my mother and I bonded more than the others.  Even when she favored Dante over me, it seemed more like a strategic alliance than a familial bond.

Aside from her vast volunteer duties and some persistent personality issues, my mother almost seemed like a blank slate.  She knew what foods she liked -- steak, shrimp, lots salt, nothing green -- but she didn't otherwise seem to know what she liked.  Who she was could vary wildly.  On the plus side, this meant she fully embraced my hobbies, including buying us season tickets to nearly every live theater in our area when I showed a passion for it.  She said I made her feel "cultured." 

My dad and I had little in common.  He knew what he liked -- jazz, stargazing, bad '80s movies -- but his hobbies seldom overlapped with my own.  He introduced me to the television show "Ghost Hunters" around the time I was trying to divorce him from my increasingly mentally ill mother, and that gave us something to talk about on our phone calls until I changed cable providers and no longer got the right channel.  He liked what he liked.  He was unwilling or unable to feign interest in topics simply because they mattered to me.

I took music lessons from a young age, but I didn't enjoy them, only the attention gleaned from performing.  I dreaded the actual live performances, but people would hug and praise me afterwards, and I lived for that.  I liked museums and art galleries, though I only got to see them when a friend's parents or a school field trip would take me there.  I loved reading.  My mother read me stacks of books until I took over the job myself at the age of four.  I don't think either of my parents has read a book cover to cover since that day.  I'm also good at baking and enjoy eating elaborate vegetarian meals.  I love spicy international cuisine, despite my mother's insistence that we don't like onions or most vegetables and that everything should be served "plain" and "mild."

My daughter was born and soon gained a reputation as a smart, funny child with a sunny disposition.  She's still very young and will undoubtedly grow and change, but she fits in well with both my husband and myself.  My mother used to say, "I hope you have a child just like you someday," when she got angry, like it was a curse or a threat.  I battled depression from a very young age (maybe four?), but I tried hard to be good at things and to be kind and to overcome my many fears.  My thought was that if I had a child like myself -- kind, funny, hardworking, smart -- but happy, that would be great.  Why would anyone not want that? I thought. 

Something that I haven't heard much about "goodness of fit" in parenting is that, if a child is raised by her biological parents and they don't hate each other, it should come fairly naturally.  My daughter inherited half her genes from me and the other half from one of my closest friends.  My husband and I have lived together easily for many years, and while we have a variety of hobbies and interests between us, we have the same sense of humor and priorities.  We get along.  We are raising our daughter together in our home, so theoretically, whether you believe nature or nurture is the greater factor, we were always going to have a certain goodness of fit.  That didn't occur to me until well after she was born. 

I don't think I have the same sense of humor as the parents who raised me.  To be honest, it's hard to remember what made them laugh or made them seem happy, but I remember us all favoring different movies.  I don't know if I got my gallows humor from genetics or from my life experiences, but my mother didn't approve of it.  I had to pretend not to laugh at the things I found amusing for fear of being scolded or told I'm a bad person.  My half-brother, Hans, has that same dark sense of humor.  He's says its one of our German qualities.

My biological father reads and enjoys history and science.  My half-siblings do too.  My sister likes baking as much as I do.  These might all just be coincidences.  They're all common hobbies after all.  But I didn't share them with the parents who raised me.  I'm the most educated person in my family, but tied for least educated in my father's family.  Can a person really be more academically inclined -- and I don't mean smart, which I think a lot of my family was in spite of what they thought themselves, but loving of school and learning -- simply because she descended genetically from someone who was?  There are other potential explanations, after all. 

I'm sure I must've had more in common with my mother than I can remember now.  Surely I didn't just inherit similar hair and some maladaptive behaviors.  She liked crafts when I was little, like I did.  We only did them if there were other children around, like visiting cousins or a Girl Scout troop, but she liked doing crafts.  We did jigsaw puzzles together.  We both liked going out to dinner and a movie.  She liked making things beautiful, which was hard because her hoarding tendencies meant she could only beautify our home through shopping and filling it with more things.  I don't remember my mother very well, especially how she used to be before she went off the deep end.  I have a hard time remembering why I used to love her so much.  I'm not sure if that sounds more mean or sad, but it's true.  It is what it is, I guess.

When my daughter started developing a personality of her own, I was surprised.  She wasn't a stranger.  Nothing about her seemed to be pulled from the ether.  She was so much like me.  Sometimes when I saw her from certain angles, she looked like my childhood self.  She cocked her eyebrows and made mischief faces like me.  She mirrored my reactions and behaviors -- if I wanted her to be calm and happy, there was little I had to do beyond modeling good behavior and giving her "cuddles and kisses," as she likes to say.  She is young.  She still has a lot of growing and changing ahead of her, and she will make friends and have experiences outside my home and outside my control, but none of this parenting stuff has been as impossible or even as illogical as I was led to believe it would be.

I don't know what I'm trying to say.  I don't think living with your two biological parents solves all your problems, or even ensures goodness of fit.  If I'd had more in common with my dad, we might have enjoyed each other's company more, but I still don't think it would have been a great relationship because I think he'd still only value in me what he already values.  Having more in common with my mother would have solved nothing.  I'm confident that her self-loathing would have only caused her to hate me more, the more I resembled her.  I don't think my half-siblings get along particularly well with their parents either, though I do know they have more functional relationships than I do with any of mine.  We're all very different people though.  I blame the mental illness more than anything for our lack of good fit.  I believe the parts of my mother that weren't fundamentally broken were fundamentally good.  Maybe.  I guess I think the worst situation would be like Dante's -- being raised by two people whose love is conditional when it's present at all, who aren't related to you, who are not mentally healthy and cannot see far enough past their own pain to consistently give a fuck about you.  It does make me wonder what kind of relationship Dante might have had with his biological parents though.  Or with anyone else really.

Sharing Health Information with Donor Half-Siblings

I have ulcerative colitis.  It's one of the two diseases under the Inflammatory Bowel Disease umbrella (Crohn's is the other).  I have to take pills twice a day to keep the inflammation down, and I have to have a colonoscopy every couple years to screen for colon cancer since IBD increases my risk.  Mine is a very mild case that doesn't otherwise interfere with my day-to-day life.  Most people aren't so lucky.  Some need medications with significant side effects, or need surgery, or never get the inflammation quite under control. 

IBD is largely considered to be a heritable illness.  Every gastroenterologist I've met since the time of my diagnosis over a decade ago has asked if I had a family history and, when I said I didn't but that my father was an anonymous sperm donor, the doctor assured me bowel disease ran in my father's family.  Therefore I was unsurprised when I learned that my paternal grandmother had colon cancer when she died.  It did mean, however, that I should probably stop avoiding my regular colonoscopies the way I have been for the last several years because now I knew of two increased risk factors:  the IBD and the family history of colon cancer.

My half-siblings probably know about the cancer.  Our father talks to them, after all, and they actually met our grandmother, who died nearly fifteen years before I learned of her existence.  But I don't know if I should tell them about my IBD.  It seems awkward to bring up, but I do know if they ever go to gastroenterologists themselves for whatever reason, the intake paperwork will ask if they have any family with ulcerative colitis, among other things, and having a sibling with a disease does count as an increased risk for developing the disease yourself.

If I develop cancer, I will tell them.  If they told me about their own health information, or that they were having some kind of health problems, I would be comfortable bringing it up then too.  But for now, I think I will keep the IBD to myself.  I'm afraid they'd think I'm weird for bringing it up.  We just aren't that close.

I'd be interested to hear what other people -- donor conceived or adopted or not -- think on this topic.  What would you do with this relevant-but-not-necessarily-critical information?

How Do You Feel About Donor Conception?

When I've written about my experiences being donor conceived -- always anonymously, as I do here -- one of the things people ask is how I feel about donor conception.  Would I donate my gametes?  Would I use donated gametes? 

I am not vocal about my opinions on donor conception.  I am not even vocal about the fact that I am donor conceived.  While I've been happy to shrug off the secrecy imposed on me in my youth and tell anyone who asks about my origins, I don't want just anyone knowing.  My close friends and "family of choice" know.  My donor conceived acquaintances know.  My half-siblings obviously know.  When you look up my name online though, I want you to see the delicately crafted persona that I wear for strangers.  Only flattering photos and self-deprecating humor and benign facts I'd want my boss or my biological father to see.  I admire many people who are outspoken about their beliefs, but I can't do it.  If you want to know my feelings or intimate details of my life, I want you to have to ask me.

When I first tested my DNA with 23andMe, I realized I only knew two surnames in my family tree -- my mother's maiden name and her mother's maiden name -- and I wasn't even sure how the latter one was spelled.  I confided in a maternal cousin about the DNA test and being donor conceived in the hope that she could provide me with more family names.  She was very supportive and very helpful.  She also confided that she was currently in the process of trying to conceive using anonymous donor eggs.  I'm not going to tell her how I feel about donor conception.  I'm not going to warn her that her child -- should she successfully have one -- might have some strong feelings about donor conception too.  She had already spent tens of thousands of dollars on failed fertility treatments.  I do not believe my opinion would change her mind.  Instead, I think it would make it even harder for her to talk to me, and I think it would drive a wedge between me and one of the few "original family" members I have left.  Most importantly, her choice to use anonymous donor eggs does not affect me.  I wished her luck and all good things, and I meant it. 

Personally, I would not donate my eggs, and I would not use donated gametes of any kind.  I told my husband before we tried to conceive that, if we couldn't conceive naturally, I knew I could not use donated gametes.  I don't expect someone who isn't donor conceived to understand or to anticipate the pain, but as someone who is and who has gone through it, I couldn't in good conscience do that to another person.  He understood.  He had thought it went without saying. 

I believe anonymous sperm and egg donation should be banned in the US, as they have been in the UK and several other first world countries.  I believe third party reproduction should be heavily regulated, donor medical information tracked, and number of offspring per donor severely limited, the way many people think it already is.  If we continue to let the free market decide the ethics of third party reproduction, money will continue to do all the talking.  Gamete "donors" will continue selling their sperm and eggs, people who desperately want children will continue buying them, and cryo banks and fertility clinics will continue making enormous sums of money as the wish granters and middle men.  People who haven't been conceived yet don't have money.  They are the goods.  Their rights will continue to be leveraged by their parents and doctors, all decisions on the matter made for them before they are even conceived, let alone born.  This is distasteful to me.

Of course, whether anything or everything is outlawed, people can still go onto Craig's List or have one night stands or recruit family friends and refuse to tell their children who their genetic fathers are (traditional "artificial insemination" can easily be done outside a medical setting), but I think fewer people will be willing to do that who weren't already planning to do that.  I'm aiming for improving the current situation.  I don't believe there is a way to fix it completely.  There will always be children born who don't know who their genetic parents are, for whatever reason.  I just want to limit those numbers as much as possible.

I used to feel much more upset about being donor conceived than I do now.  I used to feel much angrier and sadder and more misunderstood when people challenged me or disagreed with me.  I feel a lot better now that I know who my father is.  Knowing his identity doesn't solve all my problems, but it's all I really wanted, and I got it.  No one can take that knowledge away from me, regardless of how strongly they feel that I should shut up and be grateful to be alive.  I wish for everyone who is donor conceived (or adopted, or unsure of their parentage for whatever reason) to be able to know who their biological parents are.  I think it makes things easier.  On that note, please take an autosomal DNA test.  23andMe and AncestryDNA and Family Tree DNA each do them for about $99 or less, and even if you know who your parents are, you might help someone else find theirs.

Chosen & Wanted

I grew up the younger of two non-biological siblings.  My older brother, Dante*, was adopted at birth.  This was near the end of what is sometimes called the "Baby Scoop Era," just before Roe v. Wade.  My mother said she got a call from the adoption agency (or whoever did these things -- I honestly do not know) asking if she "wanted a peanut," "peanut" being a slang term for a premature baby, she said.  He had just been born, unexpectedly early, and my mother had already lost out on twin girls she'd planned to adopt when their mother had changed her mind and decided to keep them.  She still talked about those twin girls sometimes, despite never having met them.  She had planned to dress them alike and call them Missy and Chrissy.  She recycled one of those names for me when I was born.

My mother said Dante's birth mother was fifteen years old.  She said she'd been impregnated by an older man while she was babysitting his children.  I don't know if any of this is true; it's just what my mother told us.  Dante -- my mother said she named him after a soap opera character she liked -- remained in an incubator for somewhere between two weeks and two months until he was strong enough to go home.  My parents had been married for three years when they finally adopted him, and my dad had two years left to live, according to the projected post-accident life span his doctors had predicted.  I wonder if the adoption people knew that.

I'm a little fuzzy on my mother's attempts to become pregnant.  She indicated that she'd tried to get pregnant before adopting, but it hadn't worked.  With my dad being paralyzed from the chest down, I know they'd exclusively tried via artificial insemination.  I don't know if they tried conceiving with his sperm though, or exclusively used donor sperm. 

My mother told me she'd always wanted to experience being pregnant.  She said she'd seen her own mother go through the better part of ten pregnancies in eleven years -- six of which had resulted in live births -- and she'd wanted to experience it herself ever since.  When my brother was five years old, my mother says her reproductive endocrinologist called her to entice her into trying one last time to get pregnant.  The technologies had changed and improved, he'd told her.  She went for an appointment and discovered that one of her Fallopian tubes "trailed off into nothing," as she described it.  They reattached it with minor surgery, and the very next time she was inseminated with anonymous donor sperm -- my father's sperm, Joseph Von Trapp's* sperm -- it worked.  She was finally pregnant.

I don't know if my dad ever wanted children.  My mother said he hadn't started hating Dante until he learned to talk.  She said he hadn't wanted me at all and had told her he hoped she miscarried -- and threatened to hit her until she did.  I don't know if this is true; it's just what my mother told me.  It sounds like the kind of lie she might tell, but it also sounds like something he might say.  He became my defender after I was born, but it almost exclusively made home situations worse.  When I got upset or Dante did something to hurt me, Dad screamed at Dante and my mother.  Sometimes he threw things.  He defended me so much in this fashion that, when she found out Dante had done something to hurt me, my mother would scold and threaten me in advance to make sure I wouldn't say anything that might prompt my dad to start screaming or lashing out.  He also screamed, "Why is that bitch crying again?" when he could hear me crying alone in my room.  He seemed to like me more than he liked anyone else, but he didn't seem to like anyone all that much.  Ours was a complicated family dynamic.

* These aren't their real names.

My Mother the Virgin

[Warning: I do mention sex in this post.  But as the title might indicate, it's rather limited.]

I want to write about how my parents created their family through adoption and donor conception, but I think I need to explain this part first.  I've mentioned how my dad became paralyzed from the chest down.  He could never walk again, but that was far from being the only side effect.  He had no control over his muscles below his chest.  He couldn't sit up without something to lean against.  He had violent muscle spasms.  He urinated through a catheter into a bag he wore tied to his leg under his pants, and he set aside an evening each week for "bowel training," when he sat on his toilet for hours, screaming curses and attempting to defecate.  He also experienced "counter attacks" -- a clever phrase I imagine came from the VA hospital -- when he catastrophically shat himself without warning, often when we were out for dinner. 

He also couldn't have sex.  He'd been this way since he was 21.  I didn't know that until my mother told me I was conceived via artificial insemination.  Until then, I'd assumed I just didn't understand what my dad physiologically could and could not do. 

I've mentioned that a major facet of my mother's identity seemed to be wrapped up in the fact that she was a virgin.  She told me she had been saving herself for marriage because she knew if she got pregnant out of wedlock (like much of her family) it would "kill" her mother.  I don't know if my grandmother ever told her anything of this nature, or if she intuited it or simply made it up.  My mother has always had a rather uncomfortable relationship with the topic of sex, to put it mildly, so I can imagine one of the things that appealed to her about my dad might have been her ability to get married and have children -- as she'd always planned to do, either because she really wanted to or simply because it was expected -- without being expected to have sex. 

My mother used to reminisce about her wedding night -- how she and my dad laid on their bed in their new apartment, fully clothed, eating takeout barbecue and watching the traffic out the window.  She told it like it was her fondest memory of marriage.  She really liked watching traffic go by.  When I was a teenager she added a new part to the story:  he had approached her with his flaccid penis in some attempt at intercourse, she had said something along the lines of, "Ew, gross," and he'd never tried to touch her that way again.  It's not the sort of story a mother ought to tell her daughter, but I can't help but feel sorry for both of them.  More rational or hope-filled people might have annulled their marriage after that, but my parents stuck it out for 35 years.  Their misery compounded.