On The Ripple Effect and Surprise Endings
How helping a distant cousin find her father led me to an astounding discovery about my own family.
About six weeks ago I got a Facebook message from a woman named Paula. She said she was adopted in Fort Worth when she was 12 days old and that her recent 23 and Me results had listed me as a cousin. She was looking for information about her biological father. Would I be willing to talk to her?
Little did she know that I’ve been in her shoes, the ones where you’re completely in the dark about one (or both) of the people that spawned you. Paula had no idea that 14 years ago I contacted what my friend Kate calls a “relative stranger”—someone with whom I share a lot of DNA but had never met—and asked her if she’d be willing to give me any information on my biological father. Not only was this relative stranger willing, she was kind and understanding and generous in spirit. Turns out, she’s my sister. And we’ve become very close. Approaching her, however, was one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever done in my life. So helping Paula navigate the uncertainty of her situation was a no-brainer.
After a half hour of trading Facebook messages, Paula and I had reasoned through our DNA results enough to determine that her father and my mother were first cousins, meaning that we share the same great-grandparents. But I had no idea which ones. I was hoping we were related through my mom’s mother, because I know my grandmother’s people quite well. But after Paula tested on Ancestry (which has far superior tools with which to trace genealogy) we discovered that we were related through my mother’s father’s side of the family—the Kelley’s—whom I know very little about. Since my mother passed away in 2010 and I am not skilled in the whole DNA detective thing, I asked Kate if she’d help Paula figure out who her father was. And in less than 24 hours, she had narrowed it down to two brothers: Larry, who is still living, and Lane, who is deceased.
Spoiler alert: it was Larry. And he is indeed my mother’s first cousin—one I may have heard her mention in passing once or twice.
Before I tell you how Paula’s call to Larry went, this story gives me an opportunity to mention something I’ve wanted to say for a while: there’s no absolute “right” or “wrong” when it comes to searching for, or contacting, people in your birth family. To be clear, not everyone who’s been separated from genetic kin has a desire to dig up those roots. But there’s a significant number who do, and they’re often lambasted for it. I’ve heard many a critic adamantly proclaim that it’s morally wrong to “disrupt” peoples’ lives, even going so far as to call people who contact members of their birth families “selfish.” But these detractors are neither the architects nor the arbiters of the moral high ground. If we’re going to get all black and white about this, why not consult the philosophical giants? What would utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill say about the ethics of genetic certainty? Bentham’s rubric suggests that doing whatever will bring the greatest good for the greatest number of people is the right thing to do. But in this situation that tally isn’t calculable until it has all played out. Mill, on the other hand, would say that actions are right if they promote happiness, wrong if they promote unhappiness. But whose happiness, exactly, are we talking about? The person who wants to know where they came from? Or the one who believes that adoptees and people who discover misattributed parentage should shut up, suck it up, and take one for the team?
Not that I really care what Bentham and Mill thought. But in hindsight I think that contacting my bio father’s family (which you can read about here, if you’re curious) satisfied both of their criteria. It brought the greatest good for the greatest number, because the overwhelming majority of us are really happy to know each other. (There is at least one who was unhappy that I came out of the shadows and into their lives, but we just steer clear of each other.) And in terms of happiness, I would say that my meeting and having relationships with people in my bio father’s family has promoted a lot of happiness among us. It’s even been healing for some—me in particular. Of course it doesn’t always turn out like that. Some people who seek to connect with birth relatives are met with anger, denial and stinging rejection. My point is this: yes, a long-lost child showing up can cause problems. But you also can’t fathom what kind of good might come of it. Which brings me back to Paula.
She found her bio mom decades ago, but was denied any information whatsoever about her father. Fast forward to nine days ago. Once Kate narrowed it down to Larry and Lane, Paula found Larry’s son on Facebook and sent him a message. He told his dad, who said, “Give her my number and tell her to call me.” The next morning she dialed the number, heart beating out of her chest, and within moments she heard the words that most people who set out to find biological kin long to hear:
“Welcome to the Family.”
As Larry tells it, there were some circumstances that prevented him from knowing whether the baby was his or not (too long to go into here.) But the bottom line is that he’s thrilled, she’s thrilled, and they’re getting to know each other. I am super happy for them. What a cool thing to get to make a cameo appearance in their unfolding story.
The End—or so I thought.
But a couple of days later, Paula messaged me and said,
“I’m on the phone with Larry again. He’s invited us all for Christmas!”
Wow, I thought. That’s so cool!
But what she said next floored me.
“He says he has your grandfather’s fiddle and wants you to have it.”
Wait, what?
MY GRANDFATHER PLAYED FIDDLE?
You have got to be kidding me.
When my youngest daughter was about 14, she had a very sudden and acute need to take up the violin. A pianist, she had never even mentioned the violin to me. I could not for the life of me figure out where this was coming from. I tried to talk her out of it.
“Anna, this seems like a whim to me,” I said. “I suspect we’d spend a ton of money on an instrument and lessons and then you’re going to toss it aside like you did basketball. Or swim team. Focus on piano. This whole violin thing will pass.”
But she wouldn’t let it go.
“You do realize that most of the people in your high school orchestra have been playing since they were three years old, right?” I asked. “You want to start as a sophomore?”
Yes. Yes, she did.
So I agreed to help her give it a try.
And when she graduated from high school less than three years later she had been offered a violin scholarship at one of Texas’ largest four-year universities.
But that’s not all. I have a 14 year old granddaughter who plays violin. She is so gifted she became the concertmaster of her orchestra at the beginning of her freshman year. Say what you want, y’all. But I believe in cellular memory and epigenetics. I had no idea where the whole violin thing came from. I thought it was left field. As it turns out, my grandfather and his father—one of the two great grandparents Paula and I share—were both fiddle players. My mother, who had a complicated relationship with her father, somehow failed to mention this.
If all the planets and schedules align, right after Christmas Paula and I are going to meet in person for the first time at her father’s house. She and I will both meet him for the first time, too. Not only will I learn more about a side of my family that has largely been a mystery to me, I will drive home with the family fiddle in the backseat of my car. I never dreamed that Paula’s search for her birth family would impact me in any significant way. I guess the joke’s on me.
P. S. Here’s a clip of my youngest daughter, all grown up, fiddling with friends she toured with in Ireland, Scotland and England.
Dear Laura,
I am grateful, times a thousand and into infinity, for your story about birth families and finding each other in all the ways, shapes and forms that you have. It is a silent, hidden language. And so rarely do I get to listen to the honest telling of those stories. I spent my whole life trying to shape shift, watchful, watching it from the wings (oh, Joni has given me so many ways to express, the me that was silenced so long ago first from the very beginning of my time upon this earth. Anyway, most of all, I am grateful to read about your experiences in the realm of adoption / family formations / family secrets and lies surrounding and burying so often, the truth of the why and how and why not.
As I mentioned in another comment to you, soon come. I’m a writer too, and my voice my true voice has been silenced. Not only by cultural, societal demands, sure that’s a given. And the whole and unhealthy culture around adoption, as it happened in my world, for that is the only world I know best, from the inside, now yearning to be on the outside. At the very least, to set the record straight, my record.
For the past two plus years, I’ve been on this magnificent journey of healing, generational healing. With no intention, i have no doubt caused harm by not being authentic in so many spaces and places in my life. Here on the west coast. I’m not sure what it is about being out here. I miss my family more than words can say. And yet. But still. I want to believe that i had to be in some sort of isolation far and away to be able to really look at what brought me to the place of having to okay...here are all the terms assigned to me as a birth mother...that i gave up, surrendered, relinquished and was encouraged to just get on with my life, forget, and embrace their facts of well, as an unwed mother i would never be good enough to be, a mother. That was the ransom, the cost, the tsunami emotionally, spiritually, beyond the beyond.
I see it all now through the retrospectoscope. Clear as a bell. I can feel really good about myself, now. At last. Long ago, Maya Angelou wrote and said out loud these words that whole they had meaning then, they resonate like the grandest show of lights and sound and every darned thing possible. I did the best I could. Back then, this phrase would make no senes to me. As the baby’s father would say to me on many occasions....and he didnt want the child in his life...but he punished me with the worst ... he said, what kind of mother gives up her baby. I lived with that for a long, long time. Because back then nd throughout my life, I believed in what everyone else had to say and let them tell me what was right and I did try hard, really hard to do better, be better. All things considered. And mark my words, with strength and courage I can now say, I get it. I understand all of it, the why and thy why not. Grace, whatever you want to call it. In the shape of the most excellent family doc, a student nurse in the hospital and a social worker (who i recently found on facebook and have thanked her for saving my emotional self as best she could. Oh i had no idea how to allow the helpers in. Clueless. Completely.
I have a great big birth story to tell. But not here. Not now. And not yet.
Soon come though, count on it. It will be a part of my legacy, my honouring that life that I miraculously brought into this world. I was and remain a good, kind and decent person who just darned well did not know better. I did not. And that is no excuse. That is at the very core of why, and why not. I need to tell it and maybe that’s why, in part, our paths crossed, Laura. Drawn to the centre of the beautiful way you are and the way you write. I’m grateful. And the way that you have told your own connection to the world of adoption. It has helped me tremendously and I thank you from my heart.
This is beautiful. And I love love love the musical connection. Thank you too for saying there is no right or wrong way to contact. As an adoptee I found myself apologizing, not just for reaching out, but practically for existing. "Sorry if this comes as a shock but I'm just trying to find my lineage." I have heard from others that felt the same way and it's an awful feeling.
Beautiful story. Thank you so much for sharing.