The View from Hats and Heels: Reflections on Father's Day

The magic of DNA

On Fathers’ Day, I reflect on my fathers – the one who created me and the one who raised me. As an adoptee, I had always been aware that the wonderful man who had raised me was my father. There was no other, until as an adult I began to wonder....?

My first foray into my birth origins naturally centred on my birth mother. Who was she? Why had she given me up? The story my parents told me was magical. “We entered a huge room, where there were rows and rows of cribs,” said my mother. “Daddy and I walked up and down the rows looking at each baby, but when we saw you, we just knew you were the most beautiful and happy baby in the whole room, so that’s how we were lucky enough to choose you!”

Growing up, I treasured this story my parents always recounted about how I came to be their daughter. It hadn’t happened like that of course, but what a wonderful way to let an adopted child know how loved she was. In fact, I can’t remember not knowing I had been adopted and it made me feel chosen and special.

Growing up, I proudly told all my friends I was adopted, but sometimes they could not understand that. When I was in grade four, one classmate stood up in and asked the teacher if it was true Nancy was adopted? Calling on me to answer, the teacher asked me to stand up and tell the class about it. Instead of being ashamed, as this girl had hoped, I positively beamed telling them the story of the rows of cribs from which I had been chosen. During a parent/teacher interview, I overheard the teacher telling my parents how proud they should be of the way I had handled the embarrassing situation, but for me it was a moment to celebrate.

The reality of my beginnings was far less romantic. When I did the research years later, I learned my birth mother had only been 17 when she got pregnant. The father, older and married, had then disappeared. This was back in the late forties, when having a baby out-of-wedlock was the worst shame imaginable. Today, all kinds of young women get pregnant and decide to keep their babies, but back then it was unheard of and forbidden. To do so condemned a young woman to lifelong shame and lies. It also ruined their lives, forcing them to quit school and often leave the family home.

But what about the genetic fathers? How did they figure in all this? Apparently, they usually didn’t. In my case, my mother had been sent away “to school” in another city to have her baby under the care of a Salvation Army Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers, as they were then called. Her boyfriend, had been completely unaware of the pregnancy, which was pretty normal at that time. In fact, these were pre-internet days, so the research was dogged and grinding.

I started by casually asking my mother, a propos of nothing, which lawyer had handled my adoption. After she told me, I forged a letter from my father, asking for the file. The lawyer sent it, but there was precious little information in it – only her name and job – no address, nothing else and no mention of the father. Armed with my mother's bare bones information, I searched city directories for weeks, estimating her probable age and looking for her family. Eventually I found several with the same last name. Calling each up, I finally hit the jackpot, but it was an empty one because her aunt told me my birth mother had died a year earlier at the young age of 49.

Again, no mention of the biological father.

I was crushed learning my mother had died and not particularly interested in the father back then. I had anticipated a tearful reunion with my mother and the beginning of a wonder relationship with the young girl who had given me life, but that was not to be. Instead, I contacted her relatives and introduced myself. They all knew about Shirley’s shame; some were welcoming, but others didn’t want anything to do with me. These rejections didn’t dim the pride I had always felt in how my loving family came to be my family. Eventually I travelled to the towns and cities where they lived and enjoyed learning everything I could about my birth mother – including the fact that I was so grateful she had been brave and selfless enough to give me up. Had she not, I would have been raised in poverty instead of the middle-class upbringing I had been so fortunate to have had.

I often hear stories about how adopted adults have suffered all their lives from the stigma of having been rejected by their birth mothers. Rejected? I consider myself one of the luckiest people in the world and feel only gratitude and admiration for the young 17-year-old girl who cared for her baby for six long weeks and then had to give it away, never to see it again.

Back then, open adoptions didn’t exist. In fact, the original birth certificates were replaced by the adoptive versions, effectively erasing the original baby from the face of the earth. Frankly, it worked better that way. Everyone got on with their lives and adoptive parents didn’t live in fear that a birth mother would change her mind and take the baby back. How unbearable that would be, always waiting for the other shoe to drop and finding your dreams of becoming a mother shattered.

Forty years passed and then '23 and Me' arrived. I sent for the kit, spit and sent it back. My genetic data came back, along with a host of other reports about what kind of diseases I might, or might not, contract. Then one day, the magic of DNA appeared in my message box. "Hi, apparently we are half sisters," it read. Flabbergasted, I checked the latest report and there she was -- a woman who shares more than 30 percent of DNA with me. "Half sister" was the identifer. Having had no sisters and one adopted brother, I immediately learned I had five sisters and two brothers.

Wow! Then the biological floodgates opened. I am now the eldest of eight offspring of the gentleman who sired me. To say it was overwhelming would be an understatement. To say that a tearful family reunion ensued would be untrue. Upsetting a family apple cart is not always welcome and my existence apparently overturned a long-established sibling pecking order. Some sisters, nephews and nieces reacted warmly; others I haven't heard from at all.

But you know what? It doesn't matter a hoot. I am grateful to my biological father and now know from whence come many of my attributes and shortcomings. The sister I am now closest to is the youngest, also a mistake she tells me. We bookend the lineage. When I look at my own children and grandchildren, I give thanks for being a "mistake". Without this happy accident, none of us would be around. This is an existential question I grapple with when asked if I am pro-choice, for example. That is now unanswerable.

So, as Father's Day rolls around, I give thanks to two fathers and leave the philosophical riddles to others.