It’s a family affair

Alright kiddies, listen up.

Do I have a story for you. A cautionary tale, if you will.

It’s not my story, per se, but in many ways it is.

Okay. Enough build up.

My mom is one of six children. Raised in a very small Midwestern American town, a town so small that it’s not even really a town but a hamlet.

Her mom was a Mennonite, taken out of school to tend the farm at 14.

Her dad was a French Canadian farm boy, spiritual but not religious.

I have no idea how they met, in their late teens, but they did. There’s a photo of them with some dogs from around then, and they look really happy, not just holding-dogs-happy.

They settle down on 80 acres in this tiny hamlet and start popping out babies. My grandma has three by the time she’s 26.

The first baby has asthma, so my grandma spends a lot of time with him at the town, errr, hamlet, doctor.

My grandpa is gone a lot, getting work wherever he can in the post-WWII midwest.

Three more babies come, including my mom.

So poor are they that their two-bedroom house doesn’t even have an indoor toilet. The family poops in an outhouse until 1959.

My grandpa works in a factory, and grandma flips burgers in a bowling alley.

Anyhow, flash forward to the present, minus a few years. Not to bum you out, but grandma and grandpa are both very, very dead.

It’s May, 2016. I’m sitting with three wonderful friends on the porch at one of their houses. It’s a balmy spring day. We’ve just cooked a nice brunch, and are on our second round of mimosas. We’re about to go to IKEA.

I get a text from my mom: the results of the ancestry test I bought her for her birthday are in, and she’s… 50% Ashkenazi.

“Like, Jewish?” I write.

So we spend the next couple of months trying to figure this out.

Was the test wrong?

Did grandma’s family convert from Judaism to Mennonite…ism?

“Maybe it was the doctor,” jokes my one uncle.

Wouldn’t it be funny if the one Jewish person in town was my mom’s biological dad?

My one uncle takes the test. No Ashkenazi heritage.

I take the test. 20%.

There’s a feature you can use to connect with DNA relatives, but my mom doesn’t want to use it. She knows, but doesn’t want to know the specifics yet.

But I do. I google the doctor, and find his daughter on Facebook. I am a master stalker.

Her profile photo is a picture of her when she was 17. She’s a year older than my mom. They went to school together. They know each other, and do not like each other. How did no one notice that they were FREAKING IDENTICAL at that age?

So obviously, my mom’s biological dad was the town doctor. Her siblings are all half siblings, and she’s got another half-sibling to boot. (And likely, another, as it turns out.)

We’ve confirmed it through the DNA settings. Her bio father, also very dead, confessed it to her half sister when her mom died.

Like I said, my uncle had asthma. I don’t know what the treatments were for asthma in the late 40s, but grandma took him to the doctor a lot. Maybe they fell in love, maybe he traded goods for services (wink), we’ll never know. Everyone is dead, very dead.

They say that family is what you make of it, and that’s very true.

But they also don’t tell you what it’s like to find out you aren’t who you think you are. There are a lot of conversations and memories and anger and questions and various emotions.

It’s weird. It’s hard.

It’s hard even when it’s not your dad.

It’s still kinda hard years after the fact.

My mom’s always been different from her siblings. “Black sheep” isn’t the right term, because you don’t typically use that phrase to describe people who are smarter or more talented than everyone else in the family. <paints nails emoji>

As her kids, raised in communist Northern California, visiting once a year, we were always different than our cousins, too. Outsiders.

I wanted so badly to belong when I was younger, and this news confirmed that I would never be one of them.

Of course, all of this happened before the 2016 election, and you can perhaps guess (being in the rural Midwest) which way my family leaned.

Frankly, I don’t want to belong any more.

I’ve cut off most contact with them, which was hella cathartic. If they want to reconnect, it will be on my terms, something it’s never been in the past.

So here are the lessons:

1. DNA tests can be a great way to connect with your heritage, but be careful what you wish for. You might be surprised by the results, and, just like hepatitis, there are no take-backsies. Also, you probably aren’t Cherokee.
2. As Hannibal Lector said in one of the greatest movies ever, “if you lie, I’ll know it.” DNA don’t lie, motherfuckers!!
3. DNA isn’t family and family isn’t DNA, but family is confusing and weird either way.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.