Although I’m taking a brief hiatus from this column in order to travel and promote my new novel, a recent issue came up that made me think. I can’t stop asking questions about nature and nurture, and I’ll tell you why.
In the past week, I heard three amazing stories of what happened when three people casually swabbed or spit and sent the sample to one of the several sites (Ancestry DNA, 23 and Me, My Heritage, etc.) that test DNA. They learned many things: about their ethnicity, their possible health risks and, importantly, about people who, based on the site’s data base of DNA, are most certainly relatives.
In the first case, a friend, a woman in her 70s, who knew she was adopted, but knew very little about her family of origin, wrote me about an awe-inspiring development in her life. On one of these sites, she discovered a half-sister. Contacting her newly found half-sibling has opened the door to learning information she’d always craved about her now-deceased birth parents.
In the second case, I recently met a lovely woman at a book signing. We spoke about books we’d enjoyed. The woman asked, had I read Dani Shapiro’s book, Inheritance? It’s about a woman, in middle age, who discovers that her father was not her father; instead she’d been fathered by a medical student who’d donated to a sperm bank her parents used. Through DNA testing, the author found this medical student, her biological father, now an old man. She also found a whole other family.
Amazing book and amazing story, I said to this woman at my book signing. She looked over at her husband with a meaningful look.
Elayne Klasson: Searching for your passion
When I talk about retirement, I talk about how blessed I feel. I say this for two reasons.
“Well, it’s my story, too,” she said. And the woman, Noelle, told me a jaw-dropping tale. She’d also recently discovered, through a DNA test kit, that the man she’d called Dad her whole life, was not her father. She’d been fathered by another man, a neighbor and good friend of her parents.
Her mother and this man had had a love affair of which Noelle was the product. After tracking down her biological father, his wife, and now-adult children, she visited New England. There she made some shocking discoveries. Both she and her father are accomplished artists. Remarkably, they are accomplished in the exact same medium: art made from seashells.
I looked at pictures of this woman’s art as well as those of her father. It was uncanny. I could not discern the difference. They could have been done by the same person. Raised by a different man, she now has discovered her biologic father, with whom she shares a strong physical resemblance, as well as talents and affinities.
As if these two stories were not enough, later that very same day, I was having dinner with my daughter and her boyfriend. The boyfriend is from a fairly traditional family. His grandfather, his father’s father, now deceased, is remembered by all his children and grandchildren as being a church-going, strait-laced man. Yet on a similar DNA site, the boyfriend’s dad discovered he has a half-sibling.
This sibling is now in his 80s — older than any of the other brothers and sisters. In their initial conversation, the family discovered that this gentleman had been raised in an orphanage in the same Midwest town where they all were born and grew up.
Four siblings were raised in an intact family — with many cousins, aunts and uncles, while their older half- sibling grew up in an orphanage, not knowing a single soul he was related to. Now, this elderly man, coincidentally, lives in Southern California, close to where his newly discovered siblings and their families also live.
Elayne Klasson: A five-year pregnancy, a novel is born
Today, my latest baby was born: my novel. It was recently released by my publishers, and, frighteningly, I have been receiving pictures all day from friends far and wide holding my book, having pre-ordered it.
The family members are shocked, still processing this information. They are thinking about all the questions they’ll never get to ask their deceased father and grandfather. Who was the mother of their half-sibling? What were the circumstances that placed him in an orphanage? I hope this newly found brother is able to attend this large, extended family’s Thanksgiving celebration next year. I’ll bet he’ll discover many common tastes and attributes he shares with his birth family.
I am not completely neutral in this discussion. The youngest of my four children is adopted. Besides looking radically different from the rest of our family, he has many unique behavioral characteristics. I wish I could persuade this son to investigate his biological heritage. So far, he has chosen not to do so. And, it’s his story to investigate, not mine.
The very essence of who we are is what I’m fascinated by. Which attributes are due to biology? Which are due to the way we are raised? Nature versus nurture.
I’m a story teller; unendingly interested in these questions of identity. Perhaps, some might argue, we’re better off not discovering family secrets, better before the era of DNA testing became available to anyone who can purchase a kit. I disagree. I’ve never known a situation to be better when it is cloaked in secrecy.