I’ve joined a club
By: Kay Mcmahon
Tags: Npe, Dna, Adoption, Family

A story in three parts.

Part one:

I was in my late 40s when I discovered I had a half-brother, Mark. He’d been adopted as a baby and was looking for his mother, Clara (not her real name). Mark uploaded his DNA to Ancestry.com and got a close match with my uncle. He knew the match came from the paternal line and subsequently, with the help of my uncle, figured out which of the brothers* was his father. Who was kicking about with a girl called Clara in Hamilton, New Zealand in 1967? It turns out, it was my dad, Bruce.

(*three to five depending if you include the ones given up for adoption)

Dad had no idea that Mark existed. This surprise son, now in his early 50s, was fortunately living in Melbourne and able to fly the relatively short distance to New Zealand to meet dad, and his family there, before emigrating to the UK weeks later, where he met me. The back story is sad and common: they were teenagers, Clara only 15, dad was 17. She was banned from ever seeing dad again once she was pregnant, and never contacted him again. When Mark flew to New Zealand he saw his mother’s face for the first time, a small photograph in a locket dad had kept all these years — he’d only binned her love letters a few years earlier.

Our dad Bruce in 2013

When I met Mark I marvelled at the similarities to our dad — his jawline, the same diminutive height, his introverted nature. It felt so easy to be in his company — we had people in common weirdly, through his partner’s profession as an epidemiologist.

Finding his father was an unexpected surprise, and even now, Mark still hasn’t found Clara.

We’ve met up a few times for lunch, with opportunities reduced due to the rolling lockdowns in the UK. It was not long after a chilly outdoor pub lunch I decided to buy an Ancestry DNA kit so that Mark could see our shared paternity line. I knew how to map back 6 or 7 generations from dad’s family, and thought it would be nice for him to see our shared lineage.

I’d taken a 23andMe test some years ago for the health and traits information as a foil for my husband, who’s adopted. Knowing my lineage I thought I would be able to flag any discrepancies in the genealogy and heritage results — of course it showed up as 50% SE Asian and 50% Northern European for me, as I’d anticipated, and only matched with some distant cousins (with unfamiliar names) but as the lions share of their database of participants is in the US, it didn’t feel like anything was out of sorts.

Mark and I had a WhatsApp conversation that seems strangely prophetic

My Ancestry results took almost two months to hit my inbox. As I logged in, was immediately confused — there was no match with Mark, or my uncle. I emailed ‘customer solutions’ to ask if there was a lag with their database and endured a two-day wait, only to be told matching is ‘immediate’. Oh, I thought, Mark isn’t tech savvy so probably doesn’t have his ‘sharing’ settings switched on. He did. From my utter denial of the impending situation, I could feel a visceral wave of panic rising. I had matched with over 8,000 people, more than a dozen ‘close relatives’ and had begun messaging 1st-2nd cousins frantically looking for answers.

At this point, it still seemed implausible to me: my kids have my dad’s blue eyes. We all have the same athletic body shape. It didn’t feel true. And in the words of virtually every other person who’s discovered that their parent is in fact, not their biological parent, the truth is on a rug that’s been pulled, quite suddenly, out from under you. At the age of 50 I discovered that I was a cliché — along with 1 in 25 people who take a DNA test, I became an NPE, aka Not Parent Expected. And wow, what a club — the day I made my discovery, a brand new BBC TV show called DNA Family Secrets aired and I sat there in disbelief hearing a man in his 50s articulate how I was feeling: “I had no idea. All my memories… were not what I thought they were.”

It was overwhelming news. Seismic. The feeling of grief was all consuming. The crying jags came regularly and wouldn’t stop. I felt rudderless — not least because my (adopted) husband’s attitude was “Your dad’s still your dad, what’s the big deal?”. Adoptees, and donor conceived people, who know this information have often had years to process and come to terms with it. I’d had days (as I write this, it’s not even two months and while each week gets better, the crying jags still come.)

Me and new cousin

One of my new cousins was super responsive and her profile picture showed a young woman with my daughter’s nose and my chin. It was unnerving. I was looking for any male relative she had who was born in the 1940s. She thought the best candidate was her mother’s uncle, a bit outside my date range but a ‘ladies man’ who ran a pub in Nelson and had left his wife for a much younger woman. This seemed to fit the bill… until another cousin responded who wasn’t related to the uncle, it was looking likely that it was the publican’s teenage son.

Within two days of finding out my dad wasn’t my biological father, I had the name of the man who was.

Part two

The internet’s a wonderful thing — moments after typing my biological father’s name into Facebook I was looking at photos of him and his life. I was gobsmacked to see we’d both worked in radio for the same company, but it meant we had people and it turns out, experiences, in common.

I reconnected with a mutual colleague from the 1980s to do a little digging. I couldn’t take the word of his relatives, who encouraged contact, because there was a chance we may not get along (What if he’s racist? Homophobic? A bully?) I needed to know if this was a person worth contacting. The feedback was positive, so I decided I would make contact with Ray, a retired broadcaster.

Me working in radio in the 90s

But how best to drop such a bombshell, to someone who has gone about his life and knows nothing of this adult child (and grandchildren)? One friend in New Zealand offered to fly to the remote town he lived in, and deliver the news in person to lessen the shock. (She would have created more of a shock, being an ex-TV news presenter, he would have thought there was about to be an exposé.)

I decided to tread carefully: I knew Ray had no other children so I thought he wouldn’t outright reject the notion of someone popping up to make that claim at this stage in his life. Nonetheless, didn’t want to be the instigator of a heart attack from such unexpected news. I got his email address from the old colleague and sent a photo of my mother from many years ago with a super vague message: “I’m writing with a question for you, I believe you know the woman in this photo? I have a bit of a mystery to solve, which you may be able to help with.” I’d removed my name so he couldn’t Google me, and waited.

My friend/cousin Mary, in 2009

10 days later, no response. A friend’s relative was commenting on a lot of his photos, so I asked her how they were connected. Turns out Ray’s first cousin is my friend’s aunt. (Making my friend of 26+ years my second cousin) New Zealand already felt small but this was getting claustrophobic. The aunt was able rectify the issue: the email address was missing a fullstop.

The email was resent and within 30 minutes I had a reply with the most unexpected sentence:

“Oh my dear god, you are my daughter”.

This is the bit in the movie when the sound of the needle scrapes across the record and stops abruptly. My imagined scenarios (a fumbled one night stand, an overlap in paramours, a sneaky affair perhaps) didn’t include the one when he actually knew of my existence. I certainly didn’t know about his. It didn’t seem possible that a man with ‘no children’ wouldn’t seek out the one he knew about— not to burst into my life playing the dad card, but at least to find out if I’m ok, that I didn’t end up in a gutter, even if from online and afar. My LinkedIn profile is always up to date.

Ray working in radio in the 90s

But he didn’t know my name, and despite contacting my mother a couple of times, was unable to get any information out of her about me. (My mother and I have been estranged for more than 30 years.) Within weeks we’d exchanged numerous emails, messages, photographs and family tree blanks. Ray’s mother is still alive at 92, and his sister doesn’t have children either, so I’m the only grandchild — my kids the only great grandchildren.

So how did I happen?

Ray was 15 and still in school uniform when he met my 20 year old mother who was working in his father’s pub. They were an item for three years. When she fell pregnant at 22, he’d wanted to marry her but she said at 18 he was too young and took off to have me, planning to adopt me out. A while later he hears she’s had a daughter, gotten married and to stay away.

So he did.

Part three

The big question for me, one that Ray didn’t know the answer to, was did my dad know. My mother being the person she is, I imagined she tricked dad into thinking he was the father. How else could you explain why a 21 year old sportsman (he was competing in the Commonwealth Games that year) would marry someone he barely knew, take shitty jobs in factories and ultimately move to a city with no family nearby, to raise a kid who’s not yours?

My dad is not a communicator: we don’t chat on the phone, we don’t write missives, since he got a new PC we hadn’t Skyped as he hadn’t gotten around to reinstalling it. Since the discovery of Mark a couple of years ago, I hadn’t spoken to him directly. All our messaging is via my stepmum, also called Kay. Dad is a man of few words, it takes a while for him to warm up. He’s great in person, but on any other channel, it’s a struggle.

My parents on their wedding day in 1970

The non-communicative relationship was at odds with the onslaught of messages I was getting from Ray — we’d ping each other updates several times a day. It was overwhelming and intense and some of the information was horrifying (my mother really is a piece of work and if our estrangement hadn’t kicked in 30 years ago, it would have now.)

I decided early on I wouldn’t tell dad — why break his heart now? Let the man enjoy his third chapter in peace. He loves me, his loves his granddaughters, we’re good. I mulled it over for a few weeks. But then as new relatives added me on social media I became anxious that someone would leave a comment under a photo, and while my dad doesn’t use Facebook, my sisters do and maybe something would come out. It was too big a secret — and perhaps it would help him make sense of my mother?

I set up a video call with my stepmum. The call was half an hour long and for the first 20 minutes, dad didn’t say much. I tried to talk about his mother’s funeral (hilarious but a story for another time) and then to find out how he felt about Mark. “I was bowled over” he said — a sentence! “You go through life and then 50 odd years later, you find something like that out…” His voice trailed off. I couldn’t stem the tears knowing what was about to come. “Well, on that note, I might have a bombshell for you, too… I took a DNA test. And I didn’t match with Mark.” There was a tiny pause, then he breathed out and said quietly “Yeah.”

“Yeah? You knew?” The one scenario that I wouldn’t have allowed myself to think was a possibility was true. Turns out he’d met my mother just before she was about to give birth, and convinced her to not give up the baby. He adopted me, which is why he’s on my birth certificate, and that was that. His entire family knew. Incredible that none of them hinted. If one of them had said anything, I wouldn’t have believed them anyway — in a way, doing that DNA test was an efficient shortcut to the truth.

I asked dad if he was planning to tell me when he came stay with us in the UK some years ago, and he said “No, I was never going to tell you, but I’m glad you found out before I died.”

He said I was his dream child.

There’s so much more to this story, and it will play out in the coming weeks, months, years. Right now, my heart is broken for this lovely, sweet, easy-going man at the life he could have had in his 20s but didn’t, so that he could be the loving, normal parent in my life. I’m so grateful to him. I’m so relieved that he knew — that he chose to go into this willingly.

Dotted lines indicate marriage

There’s a lot to unpack that’s painful and I probably won’t meet my grandmother before she dies, due to the New Zealand quarantine. But there’s a lot of good — the timing means I can ask questions of my dad, and I get to know Ray before it’s too late.

We both feel robbed of time but I wonder if I’d found this out earlier if I would have been so accepting or just full of rage, at everyone, for lying?

I’m so modern, I’ve got no mother and two dads. And I will be fine. We’ll all be fine.

Useful resources for new NPEs

“How to heal a broken heart” by Rosie Green — a book about moving on from the pain of your relationship ending, written for the divorce market. I started reading it the week of my DNA surprise as I love the author but each chapter ended up mirroring my own journey of grief.

Adoptees, NPEs, Donor conceived and other identity seekers (Facebook support group)

Severance magazine

Welldoing.org (Find a therapist)

NPE stories podcast

Cutoff Genes podcast

Suddenly family podcast