My aunt bought me an AncestryDNA test as a 32nd birthday present. I knew I was a quarter Irish and a quarter Jewish; my dad’s mom was an Irish Catholic immigrant and his dad was a New York Jew. My father’s family emigrated to the U.S. shortly after the turn of the century and quickly assimilated, so no one was absolutely sure where the Zechnowitzes came from. Were we Russian Jews? Polish? Lithuanian? If you asked my grandpa where our last name came from, he just gruffed, “Whaddya mean? It’s Jewish!”
Little did I know that the true circumstances of my conception would surface through the flume of that test. It turns out, I’m not a Zechnowitz at all.
This news washed over me, leaving only questions. Both of my parents have already passed away. My mom succumbed to cancer when I was 18 years old and my dad battled a series of heart complications before letting go of life 10 years later. My mother took the secret of my paternity with her, and my father ostensibly never knew.
I had never suspected I wasn’t my father’s child. But there was one inconsistency sullying my certainty. All of my grandparents had blue eyes, my mom’s were a deep lapis, and my dad’s were a wolfish icy blue. My eyes are tobacco brown. I remember doing Punnett squares in a high school science class, learning that it’s not biologically possible for two blue-eyed people to have a brown-eyed kid, but I still didn’t put it together. Everyone always said I looked a lot like my dad.
“She’s a throwback,” my mom would say, harkening to a maternal great aunt of mine who possessed big brown eyes. I accepted my mom’s explanation and didn’t press further.
When my paternal Aunt Kim and I both spat in the plastic tubes and sent them on their way to the Ancestry labs, I didn’t expect much to be interesting. When my results came back, I was a little surprised and slightly deflated by the 98% Northwestern European reading — and the only 0.4% Ashkenazi Jewish DNA that was apparently mine. What befuddled me more was that I couldn’t find my Aunt Kim among my DNA matches. I called her and asked if there was some step I needed to take to “add” her to my tree and get the dang site to show me our obviously shared DNA. Was her profile set to private?
I looked up the amount of DNA that one typically shares with an aunt or an uncle, thinking that maybe we just didn’t get dealt any of the same genetic cards. But the range is 13%–25%, and it is impossible to share 0% DNA with a parent’s sibling. Deciding that there must have been a mistake, Aunt Kim bought me a second AncestryDNA test — plus two 23&Me tests for us to compare.
As I waited for the second test’s results and speculated with my aunt, I kept this puzzling information at an arm’s length. Surely there was a reasonable explanation. My aunt and I began to posit: Was my father adopted?
Even as I tried to ignore them, shards of truth began to work their way out of my skin like splinters. Phrases that I heard in my youth began to surface in my head like underwater leviathans, monsters that had been biding their time in the depths of my consciousness:
“No Zechnowitz has ever gotten a tan like that!”
“Where’d you get those big brown eyes from?”
“How’d you get that booty?”
One day not long after I’d received my confusing DNA results, a chance encounter between my paternal uncle, Steve, and Richard, a family friend, started to lift the fog of confusion. My Uncle Steve had heard about the DNA results and when he ran into Richard, he remembered that Richard had cared for my mother, Patti, when she was terminally ill with cancer. Hesitant to disclose family drama but curious, Uncle Steve asked Richard if he had any clues.
“Hey, you know we got some surprising results from a DNA test Jessie took — you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? Did Patti ever say anything?” he asked.
Richard got twitchy and overanimated, his long arms gesticulating. “Yeah, actually I do. Tell Jessie to get in touch. See ya around Steve.”
He hurried away.
When I heard, I knew it was time to bring my hands away from my eyes. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. I wrote a quick email to Richard, peppering it with my mother’s endearing colloquialisms. I was at work at the time, and after sending the email I buried my head in the sand of work-related tasks. I felt a little shaky, a little nauseous. I avoided my inbox like a hot skillet.
Richard responded in the next day or so. He wrote that Patti had simply told him, “If it ever comes up, Dave isn’t Jessie’s biological father.”
That was it. Richard, unsentimental and stalwart, didn’t ask questions and didn’t tell a soul. He said he could hardly remember the conversation, he had put it so far from his mind. An unsavory secret, the words of a dying friend spoken in confidence 15 years prior. He had no names, no leads for me.
By the time my mom gave birth to me, at 32, she had calmed into a sober, buttoned-up homemaker and legal secretary. But man, did she have a colorful early adult life: running away with a carnival at 16, marrying a Ferris wheel owner, giving birth to twin girls, and becoming a divorcée all before her 20th birthday. Still, the mother I knew was seemingly wholly incapable of telling a tale this tall. It became apparent that no one else was aware of the circumstances of my conception other than my mother and my biological father, whom I’d eventually discover and would later relate to me that he’d been “sworn to secrecy” by my mom.
My parents had been married for six years before my birth, which I’d always been proud of. To me, it meant that they were truly in love, enjoying their time together before bringing me into the world. The opposite of a shotgun marriage. But as I got older I began to hear stories of how badly they wanted a child. All told, my dad had a hand in raising six women. The first two were my mom’s twins, who came into his life when they were eight years old. Then me, followed by my sister, who was adopted as a newborn. My parents divorced when I was 13, after my dad “fell in love with someone else,” as he put it. That woman had two daughters of her own.
It was this betrayal that woke me from the spell of believing my parents were infallible. I idolized them both. My mom for her wit and her deep knowledge of me. She was so braided into the fabric of my being that I often referred to her as my soulmate. My dad was my co-conspirator, picking me up from school on his motorcycle, still dressed in his white collar and khaki slacks from work as a county planner.
His leaving our family of girls for another family of girls was a pain that smarted with the intensity that only a teenager could muster. I was choked with rage. I cloaked the hurt in anger. I totally disregarded his attempts to parent me, citing his moral compass as degenerate. I only let the sadness come squeaking out of me one time. I was in the car with my mom, who pulled over to the shoulder of the road and held me in her arms, crying and quaking along with me.
But even then, she never let the fact of my true fatherhood slip. Not to me, not to him. Never a whisper; never a breath. Never.
After Richard spilled the tea, Aunt Kim took it upon herself to solve this family mystery. She made it her mission to help me find my bio dad. We had no idea who he might be… was he a sperm donor, a friend, an affair? All of the new family members that Ancestry listed as relatives of mine seemed to live in Ohio. Aunt Kim began to look them up, one by one. She happened upon an obituary that listed surviving family members, one of whom lived in Florida. A man of a certain age.
Bingo. Larry. (I’m using a pseudonym for his privacy.)
He lived in our small town, a DJ at the local radio station. I felt a ringing in my ears. A buzzing in the back of my head. Hadn’t I heard this man’s voice on the radio growing up? Surely I had passed him on the street… the radio station was less than a mile from my dad’s office. The very same radio station where my mom used to work as a secretary.
I found him on Facebook right away. We even had a friend in common. My Aunt Kim had warned me that there are ways to approach a person in a situation like this (namely, through a third party), but I boorishly fired off a Facebook message instead. “Hi Larry, I think you may have known my mom, Patti Zechnowitz.”
A reply from him popped up in my notifications. Sweat bloomed in my armpits as I opened the Facebook message from this man I had never met, but who was possibly responsible for half my genes. He was about to confirm what I had already begun to discover: that my dear daddy wasn’t my biological dad after all. My dad’s thrill-seeking nature, my grandpa’s bookish intellect, my Aunt Kim’s fine features — so many of the parts that made up my engine were actually foreign, not domestic.
He wrote back, “Yup, loved Patti.”
I read his words, my eyes tracing every letter… L O V E D P A T T I.
He sure had “loved Patti” apparently. We switched from Facebook to email and started a correspondence wherein he confessed that my mom came to him, frazzled by the fertility issues facing her and my dad. “She asked me to help, and she swore me to secrecy.”
As I studied his face in pictures, and those of his two daughters, I didn’t exactly feel a sense of kinship — but yes, of course, his eyes were brown like mine. To this day, we haven’t met or talked on the phone, but we’re still Facebook friends, and we exchange Christmas cards.
I write this essay sitting with a milk-swollen chest nursing my five-month-old baby. I look into the dark mahogany of her eyes and I feel overwhelmed with happiness that her father is known to her. He is not a secret.Our fruit produced a flower. This is a fact of love, and one of biology, too. How lucky! When I was pregnant, the reality of it felt impossible to me. I would dream that Kingston wasn’t her father, and in the dream, I’d be filled with a hysterical fear that he would find out.
I think I felt a generational anxiety inherited from my mother’s situation at my birth. It doesn’t seem fair that I should have to feel it too, this truth that must have eaten her alive, a swarm of worry and lies of her own conjuring. I felt it keenly, as surely as I see her jawbone when I look in the mirror. How can I be mad at her? I’m here. She was my mother. She loved me, she loved my father, my father loved me.
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