My Theory Of Relativity
or How I Accidentally Uncovered A Decades-Long Family Secret
I’m sick of the apps. I will defend myself that my use of them is special and necessary and utilitarian. I’m not like everyone else who uses them for shallow validation.
No, I’m not talking about those apps. Although I did serve my time (ages twenty to twenty-four) on Tinder. I’m not talking about Instagram either. I review books there and try to take aesthetically pleasing photos of those books. No, I’m talking about the DNA apps. 23&me. Ancestry.
A couple of years ago, everyone was frothing at the mouth to spit into a tube and put it in their mailbox just to find out… what exactly? That they’re a slightly different type of white than their parents told them? That they have some 4th cousins in Italy? I don’t know, but we all did it. The two major DNA testing platforms have sold 40 million kits between them, and with a number like that, I think I know what human weakness they’re cashing in on: vanity. The mirror just doesn’t cut it in the modern day. All Narcissus had was a fucking pool of water to gaze at himself in. Now we can fixate on ourselves down to the genetic level! We can navel-gaze via the ancestral record! Hooray for progress!
I talk shit, but I did the kits. Both of them. I was interested because my dad was generally very unreliable with things like “facts.” His relationship to the truth was always tenuous, distant. He could see reality like a sign on the horizon, but he couldn’t focus enough to actually read what it said. He’s an “embellisher,” a “storyteller,” but I think he’s told so many “stories” by this point that he can’t keep track. His lies are harmless, self-serving, delusions of grandeur. Whenever I asked him about our ethnicity or where our family came from, I got a different answer. Sometimes we were French and sometimes we were English and sometimes he’d just wave his bottle of Budweiser around and gesticulate vaguely, telling me, “Just mix up all the whites.” This seemed like all I was going to get, so I stopped asking around second grade. It didn’t really matter. I knew that I was probably around a quarter Norwegian from my mother’s side, so if anyone asked, I just told them that. I didn’t think about it at all for years, until the kits.
Around the same time that 23&me and Ancestry were gaining popularity by spamming the world with ads about “connection” and “tradition,” I had just finished my time in rehab and was on the personal quest of self-discovery and reinvention that so often follows ninety mind-numbing, soul-searching days in a detox facility. So, I asked my mom about the kits. I said it might be interesting, given how her first husband didn’t seem to know anything about his family. I thought maybe since these tests were advancing, there could be some way to see if my disabilities had anything to do with genetics, if I’m predisposed to some disease we aren’t aware of. Plus, I have a fraternal twin sister, and I wanted to compare our results, purely out of curiosity, because twin stuff is often strange and fascinating.
I had no notion of the events I was setting in motion by casually mentioning these tests to my mother.
First of all, she was being cagey, which isn’t like her. Later on, she told me that she wasn’t sure how, but she just thought that I knew something. She thinks too highly of me. I wish I were as smart as my mother thinks I am. She thought I was doing some kind of reformed junkie personal detective work. And truthfully, she wasn’t entirely wrong. Coming out of addiction can be a uniquely frustrating experience because all of a sudden, you’ve got a lot of time to fill. All that time you wasted doing drugs, or getting drugs, or thinking about new ways of doing or getting drugs, is empty for you now, and sweetheart? There are way more hours in the day than you remember.
But I wasn’t sleuthing, it was even worse: I was bored. Cripplingly, woefully, achingly bored. My brain was still coming back online after I spent some developmentally significant years of my life high. Ages eighteen to twenty-two? High. Christmas? High. Grocery shopping? High. First thing in the morning? Trick question. I slept until deep in the afternoon, but the first thing I did when I woke up was take stock of my stash and figure out the fastest way to oblivion. Over time, oblivion got harder and harder to reach, so I settled for numbness. In 2016, it finally occurred to me that after years of eating opioids like Skittles and accidentally burning the webbing between my fingers with a blowtorch more times than I could remember, I probably needed to get clean if I wanted a halfway decent life.
There I was. I had my fresh, shiny, sparkly sober brain and it needed something, anything, to entertain it, so: genetics tests? Why not.
Shortly after first mentioning the kits, I got a call from my mom, saying that she needed to have myself, my twin sister, my stepdad, and her all get together. My sister and I were twenty-two, living in separate apartments, making this an inconvenient request, so we asked why. My mom said it had something to do with insurance paperwork, us all needing to be together to sign something. It didn’t make sense, but it sounded just boring enough that we didn’t press further. So, on a Tuesday in April, I sat at my dining table with my sister, wondering what the hell was going on. After a few minutes, my parents came in, arms laden with lattes and an extensive variety of pastries. My sister and I locked eyes, knowing something big was happening. My mother was visibly nervous as she passed around the endless bounty of croissants and lemon squares and hot beverages. My stepdad stood in the corner sipping a coffee, smirking, shaking his head, as he said quietly to himself, “She thinks a latte is gonna fix this…”
After a series of deep breaths and trips to the bathroom, my mom was finally ready to tell us why we were all here. My sister, who has always been more sensitive than I am, burst out and asked, “Is mom dying?!” Thankfully, she wasn’t. If my mother were dying, she’d have the dramatic sense to do this in her own home, with full makeup and jewelry, like a Real Housewife. “No, no. I’m not dying…” she said. And then it all came out, a secret she’d been keeping for twenty-two years.
Have you ever asked your mother, point blank, who your father is? No, you probably haven’t. Because you probably don’t need to. When you were a baby, your mom, whose body was the only home you’d ever known, handed you to a man. He held you, he signed a birth certificate, and he counted your fingers and your toes, so naturally you assumed that this man, the one you call “dad,” is your biological father. He was married to your mom. You have his last name. You have that bizarre, super long second toe, just like he does. He always said that your long toe is one of the only genetic traits you got from him, because you take after your mother, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Your twin sister has always been tall with naturally shiny, silky brown hair and Mediterranean features, making her look like some of his sisters, your aunts. He had children from previous marriages, so you had two adult half-brothers and an older half-sister. He was one of nine siblings, so you had more nieces, nephews, and cousins than anyone knew how to count. Divorce was the norm. There were always new wives, new husbands, more kids. I just thought my family was chaotic and kooky, which they are. It just turns out that, genetically, they aren’t mine.
My mom laid it all out. How she wanted children so desperately; how she knew for her entire life that she was meant to be a mother. How she was too young to understand that marrying a man twenty-four years older than her wasn’t the best life decision; how once she realized her mistake, she didn’t know how to leave him. There were other reasons too, but I’d like to give my mom a little taste of privacy, so I won’t list any more of them here. But just a little taste. After all, she did lie to me, every day, for twenty-two years.
So, it was out there. The man who everyone had led me to believe was my biological father for my entire life was just… some guy.
I mean, not just some guy, my mom did marry him. But still.
After she told us, it was quiet for a beat, but then I started cackling. I couldn’t stop. It was just so funny. My sister looked at me from across the table, confused and taking this with more sensitivity and emotion than I was capable of at the time. She’s always been kinder, gentler, more empathetic. But me? I was tapped out, feelings-wise. Rehab is harsh, draining shit. It’s mentally, physically, and spiritually excruciating, but at the end of the day, it’s a ton of talk therapy. Overworked, inexperienced addiction therapists are very eager to zero in on a young woman’s relationship with her father. I was laughing like a lunatic because I had just spent the last three months in a very expensive rehab facility, unpacking my relationship with my father. And guess what? He’s not even my father!
I spent dozens (dozens) of hours in therapy cataloging all the little hurts, the slights, and the moments where he failed or was just all-together absent. Those things aren’t healed just because my mom Maury Povich’ed me, but I had been keeping my relationship with my “dad” on life-support for years solely because I felt a familial obligation and now, I was… free? I was free of a difficult relationship that I was told I’d be serving a life sentence on.
After telling us everything, she handed out the DNA tests. She said we had every right to try to learn more about whoever or wherever it is we come from. Plus, any and all information we could get on my health was welcome. I spit into the tubes. I put them in the mail. And then I spent the next few months readjusting the baseline narrative my life was built on. The foundational text of my little existence got rewritten and I didn’t know how I felt about this new story. I had the urge to call everyone I’d ever known just to tell them, “You know how my dad is like eighty years old and kinda nuts and makes me feel weird and sad? That guy isn’t even actually my dad!” (I fully gave into this urge. I was dialing numbers of people I hadn’t spoken to since tenth grade. Apologies to the random friends from my past that I called out of the blue that evening in 2017. I’m sure I sounded fucking insane.)
That was eight years ago. Since then, I’ve been around the world and back about how I feel about this part of my life, how I feel about the deception, about the reality. It’s taught me about family, about love, about identity, about obligation. Some days, I’m grateful for it. It’s another weird, complicated thing on top of the pile of all my other weird, complicated things. I think about family and relationships differently now. On the one hand, my mother wanted children so desperately that she set up this baroque, soap opera-esque family secret and kept it for over twenty years. That’s fucking insane. But it shows me how deeply my sister and I were wanted by her. Her babies were coming into this world, by any means necessary. And in some strange way, I think this is how it’s supposed to be. My mother got to love us completely, privately, all on her own. I may not know who my father is, but my sister and I were brought into existence extremely on purpose. There were doctors and needles and sperm donor catalogues involved. She was hoping that once she had us, our “dad” would step up, maybe change some of his more erratic behavior, and want us as much as she did. And he did, he stepped up for a little while. I have some fond memories of him from when I was small. He taught me how to be around horses, to approach them slowly with the palm of your hand open, to gently brush their manes and tails, to ride with or without a saddle. He showed me how to paint. He taught me the joys of getting your hands dirty. But he also let me down, valued me only for the things about me that reflected well on him (my looks, my athletic record, my academic record.) Our relationship soured when I became disabled. He wanted me until he didn’t. I carried that for awhile and it hurt.
I said earlier that it turned out that my dad was just “some guy.” And that’s true. But by that logic, my stepdad is just some guy too. He’s just some guy who met my mom at the gym, went on some dates, then took a glance at her raised-by-wolves daughters, and said, “Alright, I pick these ones.” He was only 35 and we weren’t his, but he wanted us. He’s technically “just some guy” but now we watch horror movies together because he’s the only one who will laugh with me at the carnage. I know that he’d go full John Wick on anyone who wishes me harm. We grieved my best friend together, as a family, because my stepdad also cared for her. I remember the exact way my heart broke when I realized he’d lost someone too, one of his chosen daughters. Is any of that cheapened by the fact that we aren’t related by blood? No. Blood might be thicker than water, but love is thicker than anything.
