Iwas at dinner with one of my dearest friends when I saw the match, a relative AncestryDNA described with the tantalizingly vague phrase “close family.” After years of third or fourth cousin matches, their names always meaningless, I had not expected much. The closest match so far had been my brother’s eldest daughter, who AncestryDNA mislabeled as a first cousin, not niece (likely due to the fact her dad and I only shared one biological parent).
Ancestry tells you how close you are connected by the number of cM shared. (Do I know what cM means or why the M is capitalized? No, no I do not.) Before my niece, the matches had all been in the 100s and 200s. So when I saw a new match at more than 1500 cM shared, I knew it was significant. But more than that made it striking: it was the first match ever with my father’s last name.
The problem was what to do about it.
It had been many years since I’d had an active interest in knowing my father. What if we had nothing in common? Worse: what if we didn’t like each other? Between my dad and my brother, I was already contending with two conservative Cuban men: Did I want to expose myself to one more person who would rave about insurrectionists being right and Black Lives Matter being wrong?
But there was more to my reluctance to know Fernando. As a parent who would do anything for his daughter, I couldn’t help but feel that if Fernando had wanted to know me, he could have. I’ve always believed he made an honorable choice to protect his true family, but a choice is still a choice and it’s one that excluded me.
Why had I signed up for AncestryDNA at all?
When I’d mailed away the tiny DNA slush bucket, I told myself that I wanted to know about my family medical history. And there is truth to that claim; the older I get, the more that piece matters. (I like to joke that the parts all start falling off at 50.) But I am human, which means the internal dialogues I have with myself are not always 100% honest. Medical issues were secondary to the desire to know more about my sister.
One of the details of my mom’s telling of my origin story is that I had an older sister Maria Elena, who she called Ma Elena. When I was born, Ma Elena was only three or four — one of the reasons the priest told Fernando to stay focused on life at home. Throughout my life, I had imagined her, sight unseen. In my mind, I always concoct a whole appearance for anyone I’ve heard of but not met; in her case, that meant dark hair in loose shiny curls and dark eyes rimmed with big lashes.
The last time in my life I’d actively tried to learn about my birth family, I was in my 30s, and search engines were still fairly new. I don’t remember how I looked — did I Ask Jeeves? — but searching my father’s name yielded many dozens of results, baseball players and surgeons and college students. Entering my sister’s name yielded fewer results, but still too many. I finally hit jackpot by narrowing results to both their names, finding a woman a few years older than me with a Cuban immigrant father named Fernando.
I tried to work up my nerve to cold-email her. The message I wrote and rewrote was as discreet as possible, claiming that I was looking for friends of my parents who had worked for a Boston company called Flexible Connector back in the 60s. I didn’t want to disrupt her life out of the blue, so I figured I’d start by confirming that her Fernando was my Fernando, and then try to suss out whether she had any inkling about my existence. But I couldn’t do that until I hit send, which I did, nervously.
This was the 90’s, so when I got her reply, it was announced out loud: You’ve got mail.
I can still feel it in my chest, the way I drew in my breath before reading her message. Mail I had, but a match I did not. She found the coincidences interesting, but she’d never been to Boston, nor had her dad. That was the end of that and, until I signed up for AncestryDNA, the end of any effort to find the real Maria Elena again.
The cM-stuffed match this summer came with the right last name but a male first name I didn’t know, attached to an account managed by someone else entirely. I sat on it for a while, trying to decide how to approach messaging this person.
Much older than the last time I sought answers, now both a dad and someone who had lost a parent (my mom having passed in 2013), I was mindful of the complexity of filial bonds.
My dad and I had gone through a period of many years where we never saw each other and didn’t speak by phone. It wasn’t until my mom’s death that I repaired things with him, deciding to see if time could indeed heal all wounds. Our conversations were short, conducted in the Spanglish of two men not terrific at each other’s preferred language, and most often involved talking about my daughter, the Red Sox, his daily walks, my brother (who continued not to speak to him), and, occasionally, politics (a very bad idea). It wasn’t effortless but it was joyful and every call ended in him saying “I love you, sweetheart” in the thickest possible accent, a callback to childhood.
Restoring our connection had, in many ways, doused my need to know about Fernando. But that wasn’t my only hesitation: Operating from a more mature place, I was more cognizant that my sudden appearance could be really damaging. I didn’t want to be careless, the bearer of hurtful news. But I’d also witnessed several later-life birth family reunions that had gone wonderfully, so I didn’t want to assume that my arrival would be unwelcome.
I chose a vague path: I commented on the closeness of the match and said simply that I was interested in learning more about my family heritage.
And then — nothing.
In the days that followed, I thought about Fernando a lot. When I was a kid, my mom would cry whenever the radio played the Abba song bearing his name. Ignacio and I would tease her — I mean, who is so corny that they cry to Abba, right? When she told me the truth, it all made sense. She said she knew that what she had done was a sin, but she was so grateful to have me, and she actually sang aloud the line, “If I had to do it all again, I would my friend, Fernando.”
Now, of course, I’m the one who cries when I hear that song. I don’t get teary about him, but about her: imagining my mother carrying the secret, feeling shame and gratitude all wrapped up together in one package, and not being able to admit it all those years.
What might it feel like to my sister — or anyone else — to learn that secret now?
Two weeks later, I got my reply. The woman managing the account immediately asked if I was looking at my father’s side of the family. It took me two hours to respond, as I wrestled with how direct to be. I said yes, then acknowledged that this might be a sensitive issue and that I had been unsure how to approach it. Questions flew: Where was I born? What year?
My answers made things clear to my correspondent and she broke the news: the account she managed belonged to my father’s brother, an uncle I didn’t know I had.
She gave me his phone number that same night. I was rattled. Did he know she’d given to me? How might he react if I just called? When she assured me that he personally asked her to offer up his number, I gave her mine in return before signing off. But there was no way I could make that call — not right away. Something that had been a remote possibility for decades had become real in just a few hours. I needed to let my head settle down.
Before I went to bed, I talked to my daughter Lily about it. The product of an open adoption, she was supposed to grow up knowing her birth mother, who kept in close contact until Lily was 15 months old, before cutting ties with no explanation. Her birth mom is alive and well, as I know because I follow her family on the internet (which is significantly easier than it was 20 years ago when I was looking for mine). It’s always been helpful as an adoptive dad that I could commiserate with my daughter about absent parents and the conflicting feelings they can invoke.
She asked what I hoped would happen and I told her the truth: in a perfect world, I wanted to know my sister and learn about my family, but I did not really want to start a late-life relationship with my father — to me, that ship had sailed. But it’s not like I could call and say, “Hey, would you mind telling my sister about me but maybe don’t mention it to her dad?” I knew if I called my uncle, I would be opening the door to my father, so I sat on it for the night.
The next morning, my daughter and I were in an Uber headed to a high school student ambassador event, and my mind was firmly focused on my immediate family, when the phone rang. I didn’t have to recognize the number to know who it was.
My uncle was emotional when I answered. He’d had no idea I existed but he loved my father, who had raised him when he was just a boy newly arrived from Cuba. Finding me gave him back a little piece of the brother he had lost when Fernando had died in 2018.
He wasn’t sure how much I knew, but I had my sibling count wrong: “You have two sisters,” he told me. “Maria Elena and Elizabeth.”
My expanding universe filled the car until there was no space to absorb it. I didn’t want to end the call, but I couldn’t quite breathe. We were about to arrive at Lily’s school, and I had a writing deadline after that, so I asked my uncle if I could call back in the afternoon. I needed the time to wrap my head around things and I didn’t want to juggle such an important conversation at the same time as less-pressing matters. 54 years in the making, it needed care.
After we hung up and my daughter was dispatched to her tasks, I was alone with my thoughts, but there was no chance of getting any work done.
My father had died from liver cancer, the same thing my dad is dying of now, and my mom had died of liver failure. (A remarkable coincidence for three unrelated people — one has to wonder about the chemicals in use at Flexible Connector back in the day.) A friend once said that losing both parents is like the roof of your house blowing off — suddenly, there’s nothing above you.
Even before my uncle’s call, I was approaching the moment where there would be no roof, or, more accurately, the time when I would become the roof. But the idea of adding two new rooms in the house made my heart swell.
Isat in my backyard on a worn loveseat beneath an ancient lilac and dialed my uncle. He was so overcome that he handed off to my vivacious aunt, who filled me on the details of other uncles and aunts, as well as my cousins. The news of my existence was and wasn’t totally surprising; they had heard stories of a possible child by another woman who had lived in Boston in the factory days. But Fernando had stayed married ever since even so, devoted to his family, especially the two girls he prized. My aunt was excited for me to meet them.
Fear kicked in: How would the girls feel? And what about their mom, who was still alive? I hated the thought of wounding any of them with my appearance, but my aunt assured me the girls wouldn’t be shocked; she said that they knew their parents had troubles sometimes.
Noting that my uncle and my older sister have a good relationship, my aunt promised, “Your Uncle will tell Maria Elena. It’ll be fine — trust me.”
I did trust her.
But he didn’t tell my sister. And it wasn’t fine.
At my age, I should have known better: family is never that simple.
Read Part One. Next week: The Family We Choose
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Previously Published on Medium
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inrernal images courtesy of author