Eight years ago, my older sister Jennifer decided to have her children genetically tested, using 23andMe. She did it for the same reason lots of people used 23andMe back then—she thought it would be a fun thing to do.
When the results came back, she was flabbergasted.
The tests showed that their grandfather was an Ashkenazi Jew. But that couldn’t possibly be right. Their grandfather—my father—was a textile executive who had grown up in Swansea, Massachusetts, and was of Portuguese descent. Jen and my parents live a few blocks from each other in central Illinois, and she and my mom are close, talking several times a day. But when she called my mom to discuss this strange discovery, my mom ended the conversation in a panic.
With my mother refusing to talk, my sister’s imagination was racing, and she came up with a list of possibilities. Dad was adopted, maybe. Or maybe my mother had an affair we never knew about. Finally, after 48 hours of radio silence, my mother spilled the beans: My sister and I were both the products—if that’s the right word—of sperm donations.
The conversations my sister had with my mom after her confession convinced her that it was true. But I needed another two years before I got to that point. It took me that long to have my own DNA tested, something I had avoided because I was just so afraid that the test would show that my father was Portuguese after all, which would have exposed my mom’s sperm donor story as a lie. But when I finally did get tested, I discovered that my sperm donor’s heritage was southern Italian.
After the test, I was angry at my parents for having withheld such a hugely important fact about my very existence. The discovery also raised so many questions. Did I act in certain ways because the man who donated the sperm had an Italian background? (When I told a girlfriend that I was part Italian, she replied, “That explains the Jersey in you!”) Was my sperm donor someone I could find—and even if I could, was this something I should do or would even want to do? Was I genetically predisposed to a disease because of my donor’s DNA?
To my mind, though, the most pressing question was this: Why had my parents hidden this fact from my sister and me? Indeed, if we hadn’t discovered it ourselves through the DNA tests, they would likely have never told us.
