Inheriting a Stranger

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Since I began wearing makeup when I was about 15 years old, I was never the kind of girl who sat in front of the mirror for any length of time. I didn’t really even know much about putting on makeup. And since there were no YouTube tutorials back in 1980 to watch, I would just slap on some blue eyeshadow and sparkly eyeliner and call it a day.

The mirror and I have had a complicated relationship over these 10 years since my discovery. When I first discovered my Dad wasn’t my father, looking in the mirror caused me so much anxiety that it would make my heart race. I was suddenly a stranger to myself. I had looked at this face for 50 years, and it was like I was seeing a completely new person staring back at me. It’s hard to describe, but I felt different. Even though I looked exactly the same, I somehow didn’t look exactly the same to myself anymore.

“Who do I look like now?” was a question I asked myself each time I looked at my face.

Those blue eyes that I thought I shared with my Dad weren’t his at all. They were Joe’s* – a man I had only fleeting memories of. Yet here he was on my face, and I didn’t have a choice about it. I didn’t inherit my light skin, blonde hair, and round face from Dad’s German ancestry like everyone had told me all my life. I inherited those from…I have no idea who. I felt like a fool for falling for the myth that I looked like Dad’s ancestors. I would look at photos of my siblings and me all together and think, “How did I never see it? Am I just blind?” I felt bamboozled about the whole thing. My face was a living identity crisis for me.

These days, I can look in the mirror without getting emotional about it, thankfully. I’ve certainly come a long way in coming to terms with things. I don’t dread the mirror anymore. But looking in the mirror will never be the same as before I found out. I think about being an NPE** every day when I sit down at my makeup table and start putting on my makeup. It is impossible not to. My face reminds me every single day.

My daughters have been saying from the beginning of this that I look just like Joe. I didn’t agree with them early on, but as I studied each feature of my face in depth, I finally saw it. That same round face. Those same eyes. That same arch in our eyebrows, even. I am finally at peace with the physical similarities between Joe and me. That is a big step in the NPE healing journey.

This is my NPE story of discovering in 2015 that my Dad was not my biological Dad. If you’d like to follow along, I encourage you to start at my first post of the series HERE.

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