It was September 15, 2016. I was at a breaking point because I still hadn’t told anyone my secret. I hadn’t talked with my mother about my discovery, either. I was struggling with it all. I kept setting dates in my head when I would do it, and then I would make an excuse not…
Surprisingly, I wasn’t anxious to find out who my biological father was because, with every passing day, I felt in my gut that I already knew who it was. I was bouncing all around through those stages of grief, and depression was a big one now. Long-forgotten memories started to slowly become conscious ones. When…
After discovering I was an NPE, I wanted to look at my mother’s life. I wanted to understand her more. My mother hated the name Martha Lee. She lived her life avoiding it whenever she could. I remember my grandmother sometimes calling her M.L. Mom felt M.L. was much better than the grating “Maaatha Lee”…
I’m sure you don’t need three guesses to guess what the DNA results were to my youngest brother. His results came a few weeks after I compared with my sisters. Of course, he was a full sibling to my other brother and to my sisters. Which meant, of course, he was only a half-sibling with…
I was checking the 23andMe website three or four times a day. The first results that came in were for my oldest sister. She is twelve years older than me. I decided to wait for my other sister’s results to come in so that I could look at them together. Hers came just a few…
I think of those 18 months I kept this crushing secret entirely to myself as a period of complete denial fueled by panic. Besides being a world champion in compartmentalizing, I am also a master multi-tasker, so my life went on doing my routine tasks. You didn’t find me curled up in my bed, hiding…