Kerry’s suspicions about her NPE status have come and gone throughout the years. As a child, she always felt different from her siblings, but a unique medical condition caused her to push aside any doubts she had about her paternity. By the time she learned the truth about her biological father from a DNA testing kit, her mother had passed, leaving her unable to ask many questions.
Kerry offers a beautiful perspective on life and forgiveness. She talks about the stigma of being conceived as the result of an affair and how that has affected her relationship with her biological father.
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Episode Transcript
Transcripts are AI-generated and may not reflect the final published episodes.
[00:00:00] Kerry: The secret is a wedge. The secret is a, an elephant in the room, in its literal form. It takes up everything and it pushes away the light. And you don’t feel it. You don’t see it consciously, but you feel it in other ways. So when you return to your ancestral homeland, or when you finally find the truth, when you finally see that picture, that connection it’s visceral, it’s internal.
[00:00:30] Kerry: It’s when Harry found the wand. It explodes from you. That it’s your realā¦.
[00:02:12] Kerry: My name is Kerry. I’m 45 years old and. I am currently in Northeastern Pennsylvania, but I’m born and raised in New York, downstate, long Island, Queens. Nice. An accent sometimes. Coffee, water, daughter.
[00:02:31] Alexis: Yes. I love it.
[00:02:32] Alexis: Without further ado, what is your DNA surprise story?
[00:02:35] Kerry: Funny enough, I always knew that I wasn’t. In the right place, I grew up on Long Island. It was a very small community very small town feeling, even though it’s New York. And the rumor around town was that my mom liked to step out on my dad.
[00:03:02] Kerry: It was a very common rumor that was affronted to me when I was a kid, and honestly, I didn’t. I never thought that it was true when I was really young. I thought it was just kids being mean. Oh, your mom’s a, you know this. But I never looked like anybody in my family. I look like my mother surprisingly a lot right now.
[00:03:22] Kerry: But when I was young very blonde hair and green eyes and very pale skin, and everyone in my family looks. Sicilian, like Italian. My father, my two brothers, my sister, they all have dark hair, darker skin, pin straight hair almost black hair, darker skin, and everybody in my family has blue eyes.
[00:03:47] Kerry: Even my mother and my mother has brown hair and blue eyes. There are some blondes in the family, but because. They’re part of, like my father’s half siblingās family, they’re not really blood related to me. You know what I mean? They’re blonde. Their blindness came from their father who was not my grandfather.
[00:04:10] Kerry: He was like my step-grandfather because my family is a very complex family, full of secrets and lies. My father was raised by his grandparents, but as his parents, And his mother was raised as his sister. Okay.
[00:04:27] Alexis: Yeah, that’s, that’s fairly common, right?
[00:04:29] Kerry: Yeah. Yeah. And my mother didn’t know who her father was.
[00:04:34] Kerry: So we have great examples set forth here. But growing up I didn’t look like anybody in the family. They treated me very differently. And my father, at a certain point, he was very, I. I don’t wanna say abusive. I wanna say neglectful. Apathetic. He really introduced us. This is my wife, Eileen.
[00:04:58] Kerry: This is my son John. My son James, my daughter Shannon. And this is Kerry? He was the mechanic and he had a toolbox and inside the toolbox he had pictures of his kids, but not of me. Wow. There were things like that and they bothered me and I would say things and my father would say that I was being dramatic or whatever because I was like the family whipping post for everything that was wrong.
[00:05:27] Kerry: Yeah. Therapy at a very young age when nobody else did, like I was just treated differently. I looked differently. I felt like I was different. Then they made jokes. I was the mailman’s kid. Or then when they found out that the mailman was a woman, it was the milk’s man’s kid. I was the milkman’s kid.
[00:05:46] Kerry: All these different, it was constant my entire life that I was somebody else. But it was a joke. Like it wasn’t real.
[00:05:55] Alexis: But was there, do you think that there was truth to that?
[00:05:59] Kerry: Oh, absolutely there was truth to it,
[00:06:02] Alexis: But I mean, did your, so your dad knew.
[00:06:06] Kerry: So yeah, my dad suspected, okay, so my mom apparently had multiple affairs.
[00:06:13] Kerry: My parents got divorced when I was 10 years old because my father went to wake up, my mother, and she said, not now, Frank. And my father’s name is Richie. Oh wow. Okay. And again, the whole neighborhood knows this. Yeah. This is all, everybody knows this. I know that detail because the neighbor’s kids told me, not my parents.
[00:06:36] Kerry: Everybody knew, right? So my mom had multiple affairs and around the time that my parents got divorced, my father told me that he had a vasectomy before I was born. Oh wow. That he didn’t think that I was his. Now, fast forward years later, he’ll say that he never said that, and my father is a pathological liar, like to an extreme.
[00:07:04] Kerry: He makes up war stories that aren’t true. He decided he was an alcoholic one day and started gonna aa, but nobody ever moves him drinking, like he’s just, he’s an he’s, you can’t believe anything he says. And then I asked people that I know to be trustworthy, so almost everybody is dead.
[00:07:23] Kerry: But my mother had a best friend, somebody she grew up with from when she was like 16 years old. My aunt, she’s not my real aunt, but that’s what I call her. And I know who they, who their friends were at the time and things like that. And I’ve done deep diving here to try and find out just my family’s true story because there’s so many secrets and lies.
[00:07:45] Kerry: Everybody lies about everything somehow, so you can’t believe it. Like I just never believed it. And then it turns out that he didn’t have a vasectomy before I was born. He had a vasectomy like three years after I. So that squashed that, so once again, it was just stupid rumors and everybody lies.
[00:08:02] Kerry: You can’t believe anything anybody says. And then I got married and I had my own kids and I actually stopped talking to my family for a long time because they were very abusive and dysfunctional and it was a horrible situation. But they were still my family. Like I didn’t doubt that they were, there was a small voice in the back of your head, and then two of my daughters developed this kidney condition. That is hereditary and genetic. And now I’ve learned that there’s a difference between the two when this happened. And genetic means, this is what happens when you and this guy mix your stuff together. This anything can happen with the mix of the genes.
[00:08:46] Kerry: This genes your genes. But now what you have is also hereditary. So after this, every generation can have it. But that doesn’t mean that because you have something that’s hereditary, that you received it from somebody before because this could be the genetic swirl of it, so to speak. And I didn’t have any of these kidney issues in my family.
[00:09:08] Kerry: My husband didn’t have any of these kidney issues in his family, and I continued the cycle. Abuse. Unfortunately, I married a very horrible man, a very abusive man, and he would constantly remind me that my own family didn’t love me. Like he was the only person who would ever put up with me. And he would always tell me like, he’s not your father, that’s not your family.
[00:09:28] Kerry: You know what I mean? They’re not your family. And I remember when my middle daughter was christened my family did show up and people kept coming up to me and saying, where’s your family? And I said, that’s them at that table. And they’re like, You don’t look anything. I heard it all the time. You don’t look anything like them.
[00:09:43] Kerry: I look like my mom. So around the time that my kids got sick, I decided that I wanted to get a DNA test. But back then, still, this is still, 15, almost 20 years ago, it was like $400 to get a test between me and a sibling. I wouldn’t be able to get it with my dad because the thing is I wasn’t talking to my family and I didn’t want them to know why I.
[00:10:09] Kerry: So I told them that I was getting genetic testing to see if, one of my kids needed a kidney, would we be able to come through the family, right? My dad, I automatically wouldn’t be able to ask him that way because he’s too old. He’s got health problems, he ain’t giving me his kidney, right?
[00:10:26] Kerry: So I, my sister to test with me and she said no, like she didn’t care if my.
[00:10:38] Kerry: I have a drunk Vagrant brother who lives in Vegas. I had I’m one of four siblings. My oldest hung himself. My sister is, let’s not talk about that one. My other brother is a vagrant and most of the time I’m homeless. We didn’t all turn out well regardless of who our paternity was. But so had agreed to do the testing.
[00:11:03] Kerry: I had to save up to $400 and I was halfway there. I was at like, I don’t know, close to 300 I think, and then I got sick. I got sick with this really rare skin disease called Hydradenitis Suppurativa, and basically, Lost my arm. It, I had to go in the hospital and I had to have surgery, and I had this huge infection that happens either, in your armpit or in your groin.
[00:11:31] Kerry: And luckily it was not in my groin, it was in my armpit. But at the time that this happened, I remembered that when I was young, my dad had this. Same thing. I didn’t know the name of it. All I know is my dad was very sick. He had to have surgery on his armpit and he laid in the bedroom for days. And I remember like back then they used to put like this iodine look and stuff, Betadine all over you.
[00:11:54] Kerry: And you had this like arm was raised and it was all yellow. And I’m like, there’s my proof. Like I don’t need to save the money and spend the $400 on this test. He’s my dad, unless my mom had sex with two people who have this rare freaking skin disease. How likely is that?
[00:12:14] Alexis: So that put your questions to bed.
[00:12:17] Kerry: That put my mind at ease. Yeah. And I stopped looking. I stopped thinking about it. I 100% knew that my dad was my dad and I was like all happy. I’m never gonna tell him like I know. I’m never gonna tell him I’m gonna, because he’s treated me this way his whole life. I’m never gonna say anything to him, but I know the truth, and that’s it. I speak to my family for many years and we fast forward to last year right before the pandemic. My father is very old and alone and eating cat food. In an apartment in New York that he can’t afford and he’s getting evicted from, he’s a veteran and they’re offering him just a shelter.
[00:13:05] Kerry: He can’t bring his possessions. He can’t. So now this man that I don’t talk to and haven’t spoken to in years, and we’ve had a terrible relationship my whole life, I, he has to come live here in Pennsylvania with me because there’s nobody to take care of him. My oldest brother is dead. My other brother is a vagrant.
[00:13:26] Kerry: My sister is living in Mississippi and doing her thing, and I believe that she wanted him to come down there, but he was not willing to do that. For whatever reason, again, you can’t believe half the things he says even now. And at the time that I found him, he was talking to dead people that weren’t there.
[00:13:42] Kerry: And eating cat food, like I said. So I was like, all right, we have two houses here in Pennsylvania. My husband and I’m remarried. I’m not with the first husband anymore. He went off and left for a 26 year old. Ah. So then I had four kids and I was single and I was struggling, but I found the man of my dreams.
[00:14:02] Kerry: And I’m married, I’m remarried. He’s a wonderful man. Great father. We have a good life. I can’t complain. We have two houses. One of them we actually rented out. So that’s it. My father’s going into the rental house a half hour from me here, and I go and I check on him regularly and I take care of him.
[00:14:20] Kerry: Despite the relationship that we had, it has now grown into something very different. We’ve become very close. That’s good. That’s wonderful. Yeah. It’s an amazing story. It that sense in how we’ve put a lot of our demons to rest. My family has come back together in a way, not fully and never will be.
[00:14:39] Kerry: About a year or so ago my ex-husband decided to be so fun. Tell his 22 year old daughter that he doesn’t think that he’s her father and he knows what this did to me my whole life. Like we spent 17 years together. He knows what this did to me, and he made the decision to do this to his child when he lost the ability to abuse me personally.
[00:15:09] Kerry: He uses the children to hurt me. He tries to turn them against me at all times. He insists that I’ve, because he cheated, he wants to, validate that by saying I cheated on him the whole marriage. I abuse him. Oh, the stories that he spins, oh, the victim that he is, it’s terrible. I know that all four of my children are his and he would do this to me over the years, and I would be like, we’re gonna get a DNA test.
[00:15:38] Kerry: And we could never afford it, but I would be like, we’re gonna do it. And he’d be like, no. And he would take it back like I was just mad. He would say it all the time. And so when he said it to her this time, again, divorced, remarried, you’re not under my control anymore. I can’t believe you’re still hooked on this thing.
[00:15:56] Kerry: I haven’t heard that argument in a long time, but All right. As soon as he said it and he told her, I was like, we’re getting that ancestry test, because his whole family did Ancestry and they had a DNA surprise.
[00:16:10] Alexis: Oh, wow. They’re everywhere. They’re just everywhere.
[00:16:12] Kerry: Years ago when Ancestry first came out, they all got tested and they all came back.
[00:16:19] Kerry: Not my husband, but his his aunt and his cousins. And it turns out that his aunt has a different father than the rest of them, and none of them knew other than again, she had blonde hair and pale skin when the rest of them all looked, differently. Irish in there, and every time there’s Irish in there, somebody’s oh, it’s just the Irish side.
[00:16:40] Kerry: No matter always happens, because the,
[00:16:48] Kerry: Sorry. My ex-husband put this train in motion by telling my daughter that he wasn’t her father, but he’s, and I went and I got the test and sure enough, my daughter’s DNA came back and it it had said that she was his, she related to his family, obviously, she didn’t do it, but she was related to his family, so that was the proof.
[00:17:10] Kerry: But the weird thing is that it said she wasn’t Italian or German. But my dad’s Italian and German. How can you not be Italian and German? And I knew like almost immediately, but I was, I did what everyone else does, like it’s wrong. Or DNA doesn’t break down all the way, like she didn’t get that part of me, so I was like, I gotta do my own now. I gotta see what my own breaks down is. And because there’s that part of my brain that knew I didn’t do ancestry. I didn’t just want to know what my ethnicity was. If I just wanted to know what my ethnicity was, I would’ve done ancestry just like my daughter did.
[00:17:53] Kerry: Just like everybody else did. But I didn’t. My father has a sister, a half-sister, he has two half sisters, but he, one of them is on 23 and me, so I said I’m gonna do 23 and me. Because there was that part of my brain that knew right away whether or not I wanted to admit it, there was a part of that knew as soon as I was an Italian that I wasn’t my father’s. I knew it, but I, again, I was just, it was a mistake, but I’m gonna do 23 and me, because I, I want the medical report. That’s what I told myself. The denial is strong. Yeah. Oh my gosh.
[00:18:27] Kerry: Yeah. Yeah. So you did 23 and me, and I’m not related to my Aunt Barbara. Geez, that’s weird. So I called my sister and now I make my sister do it. And my sister did it, and sure enough, we’re half sisters and it’s just, I’m Irish, English, Scottish, and Portuguese. When before I was Irish and Sicilian Equally, like it was my whole, the Italian mom thing, like that’s the other thing, because I didn’t look Italian.
[00:19:01] Kerry: Like I dove hard into Italian, like I was the Italian mom. Nobody cooked the sauce like I do yeah.
[00:19:11] Alexis: So how did you feel? How did you
[00:19:14] Kerry: That was actually the most offensive part to me. I cried for days that I.
[00:19:21] Alexis: Because that’s, it’s tied to your identity and like you said, you didn’t feel like you fit it, stereotypical way, like I always knew.
[00:19:30] Kerry: Yeah. And that’s what it was like. I always knew. So that part didn’t smack me as much as the reality of what it meant. That’s what really hit me.
[00:19:40] Kerry: And then I had to know, but how do I know, how do I find out everybody is dead? How do I find out who my mother secretly sacked on the side 45 years ago. When did you find out? Right around the spring. April of this year. Of of this? Yeah. Yeah. Of this year.
[00:20:05] Alexis: And so your mother passed, and you said 20 years Ago.
[00:20:08] Alexis: 20 years ago. So you couldn’t ask her? No. So what did you do?
[00:20:11] Kerry: So I decided to get a little crazy
[00:20:19] Kerry: and I did a deep internet dive, and I also contacted I contacted all of my mom’s friends that I had contacted previously asking about my father’s lies. My father had these war stories that weren’t true and he had that vasectomy story. And, I needed to know people that knew my mom from when she was young and.
[00:20:42] Kerry: Through this I built a small list of names of people. They remembered my mom that it might be a possibility. One of them was just a family friend that they were, all close with. Another one was a border that my grandmother had a house and she rented out rooms to borders from Ireland who came over from Ireland.
[00:21:06] Kerry: One was a border from Ireland. The third name actually, my sister came up with. My sister said, you know what? I remember this guy that mommy and daddy used to fight about all the time. And when you go into the list of names you know, of people that you’re associated with, none of these names were in the most common names, as in Ancestry.
[00:21:30] Kerry: It shows you the most common names of people that you’re related to. And the names that I’m related to are all the most common names in existence. It’s Johnson Jones Brown, there’s no way to narrow anything down. I was gonna say, that does not help. None of those are the three names that I’ve narrowed down.
[00:21:49] Kerry: Who is the possibility I. My mother slept with in the mid seventies. And this is just the three that people have heard of. Who knows, I know my mom was a drinker. What if she was sexually assaulted and, in the seventies and you’re a married woman with three kids at home?
[00:22:07] Kerry: ’cause I’m the youngest of four kids. So she was a married woman with three kids at home, out drinking in a bar. And something happens. You think she’s gonna tell anybody? Not in the seventies. I had no idea what could have happened. All I know is I have these three possible names. None of them match up with any of the most common names, and I’m related to 20,000 people on Ancestry.
[00:22:26] Kerry: You can’t go through each name individually, I started going through the closest DNA matches and sending messages. I wanna know how I’m related to you. And this woman got back in touch with me and she says, I have no idea how we’re related. We’re like second cousins, but I’ll give you access to my family tree.
[00:22:47] Kerry: And I said, okay. Because that’s the other thing on Ancestry, you can look at all these people, but if they’re not showing their tree, you have no idea. Just you have no idea who you’re related to somehow. But this one woman just, it was the most random thing because nobody else had responded to me.
[00:23:03] Kerry: But this one woman responded, and her last name did not match any of the last names that I know to be, of my suspicions. But she gives me the access to the family tree, and as soon as I open her family tree, I see it. All of them are loose. And Link is one of the names on the three that I had.
[00:23:23] Kerry: The three had narrow down, like I, I can’t remember the other two. But one of them was, so I said, oh my goodness. I don’t know how to say this other than I don’t really know who my dad is. And I have a list of people that she’s possibly had an affair with. And the last name is, and you have so many limbs in your thing, do you know of a, in your family?
[00:23:48] Kerry: And she did not. And I’m like, oh, hopes dad, right? Yeah. But I, but at the same time, I, it doesn’t seem right, so I type into ancestry and sure enough I’m yeah, no, in ancestry, I’m related I, it’s gotta be linked. But how, so then I. Actually ordered a subscription to that newspaper archive thing that you can get through Ancestry?
[00:24:19] Alexis: Yeah. It’s like a premium feature.
[00:24:21] Kerry: Uhhuh. And I decided that I wanted to find Con himself and just ask him what he knew about my mom, and maybe that would helpfully get me somewhere. Maybe he had brothers or cousins or maybe there’s something, so I I went to the newspaper thing and I typed in the name and I narrowed it down to Nassau County and I was looking for births, obituaries, anything like that.
[00:24:43] Kerry: And sure enough, I found an obituary for a, who was survived by his son, junior. And they lived in a town very close to my town, and now I understood that the car was an initial. So I went back to that woman’s family tree. Sure enough, she has a great-grandfather. We’re splintered off by a great-grandfather.
[00:25:09] Kerry: There was a third brother in a family tree, so that’s why those two families didn’t even know each other. And now the obituary said Myron Sr. Was survived by his wife. And her name was Elizabeth. And I’m related to a whole bunch of on 23 and me, and by the Portuguese. Portuguese. I’m Portuguese.
[00:25:33] Kerry: So this is it. This is the guy. Yeah. I, this is definitely it. I’m, this is, I’m his daughter now. I gotta find him. Yeah. So did you looked dogs up? Yeah. Yeah. So then I paid for one of those, 39 99. You could do everything online. It is terrifying. You really can. I know in Junior can’t be the most common name in the world.
[00:25:58] Kerry: But so I, I did a background check. I found out where he lived. I found out how many kids he had. I looked everybody up on Facebook. He was not on Facebook. His current his previous wife had passed. His current wife is on Facebook and two of his three children are on Facebook. But everything is shut down in private.
[00:26:19] Kerry: Like you can’t really see. I was able to see some pictures, people put profile pictures or whatever that are made public and I just sat there staring at those pictures, man, like it just I feel like I can see myself and I, everybody I talk to and nobody else sees it, but it’s even more offensive to me now.
[00:26:40] Kerry: They’re like, no, I don’t see it. You don’t look like them. Fuck you. I feel like I do. I see it now. You see yourself? Yeah. I do I can see my facial expressions in some of the ways that their mouth sits, or I can’t explain it. I can, first of all, my hair color. This is not it is now. This is my national hair color, but growing up my hair was lighter.
[00:27:04] Kerry: My, it’s not almost black or brown. And my half sister has my very similar hair color only. Mine looks more reddish. I don’t know, like I saw myself, whether anybody else sees it or not. I saw myself and it took me a little bit of nerve. But with these background checks, you get everything. So I got his email address, I got a phone number, I got an address.
[00:27:27] Kerry: I’m like, I can send an email. I can send a letter. I can, what should I do? So I sent an email and I sent a text, and then I waited. And the email and the text said the same thing. I said, hi, my name is Kerry and my mother was Eileen, and I was hoping to talk to you about my mother, usually because my mom was a very well loved person.
[00:27:54] Kerry: Everybody wants to talk about my mom for a long time. Everybody misses her, that’s always gonna be a getter, everyone’s gonna wanna talk about my mom to close down the road. Her.
[00:28:07] Kerry: Tremendous. But, so he called me back the very next day. And I told him, and at first it, it seemed to go really well. He seemed very open to the, he accepted it immediately. He didn’t doubt it. He didn’t need to see a DNA test. And I was very hopeful that I could possibly get to know them and build something and.
[00:28:34] Kerry: I don’t know, just know a new set of a new side. I just wanna know, I just wanna know them. I don’t want anything from them. I just wanna know them, but he hadn’t quite come to terms with what he calls his sinful past. It turns out that my dad is a deacon in the Baptist church. Oh. And he was cheating on his wife with my mother, obviously my mother was cheating on.
[00:29:03] Kerry: Her husband as well. Had three small children at home and his wife was actually probably eight or nine months pregnant when I was conceived.
[00:29:15] Alexis: How did they meet? Did your family attend that church or?
[00:29:31] Kerry: No, my family’s devoutly Catholic. No, my mom and him both did taxes. My mom was the, like in the creator of the side hustle. She my mom worked for the telephone company whole time, and then she sold Avon and she sold Tupperware and she did people’s taxes and she cleaned people’s steps and she just did everything. And she was a very smart woman. And she started she took an h and r block course and she met this man through an h and r block course.
[00:29:57] Kerry: And they both had just, done people’s taxes on the side and were friends. And my sister remembered that when she was young, my mom would take her to Carl’s house because car had a son that was her age and her and the son would play while mom and car went to do taxes. Yeah. Taxes. Yeah.
[00:30:23] Kerry: And my sister remembered that my parents used to fight because my father was jealous of Carl. But again, nobody takes anything, my father says, seriously, like it’s right. That’s say, even though those things are true, like we know certain things to be true, but he’s just such a drama queen anyway.
[00:30:46] Kerry: Like he makes it all the time. Like my father’s one of those people where if he thought that it would make you like him, he would tell you that he shot Lincoln or he was on the grassy knoll. Oh my goodness. Stories that he spins that are so beyond not true. He seemed very open and receptive, but he didn’t quite know how to tell his family and he wanted to prey on it.
[00:31:14] Kerry: And he asked that I not contact him, that he contact me, and that immediately made me feel dirty and like the other woman I. And this is probably very similar to a spin that you tell women, right? I’m not gonna leave my wife or I’m gonna leave my wife. I just need time. This isn’t a mistress you have on the side.
[00:31:37] Kerry: And I decided to give him time and everybody said that same thing, give him time, but time went into weeks and he does reach out randomly. At first it was like, Once every two weeks and then it became like once every six weeks. Now it’s been like nine weeks, since the last time, it’s and he found out actually the day after Father’s Day, I text sent that text and that email on Father’s Day.
[00:32:07] Kerry: But so now it’s been approximately nine weeks since the last time I’ve heard from him. So we’re going on six months since he’s found out. I told him the last couple of times, I’m really not comfortable. Secrets and lies. I’m really not comfortable. I don’t know how you try to get to know somebody.
[00:32:25] Kerry: I everyti. I can’t just call him and talk to him or share anything, like I have to wait for him to contact me. And then when he does contact me, he talks to me about God the whole time. And that’s like a whole different complex thing. I’m not religious. And so I feel like it, so I don’t know.
[00:32:47] Kerry: It’s so complicated. Comes more and more offensive as time goes on. Yeah. To the point now for anything to do with them. Wait until he dies and contact my siblings.
[00:32:59] Alexis: So that’s your plan. You’re gonna wait, you’re not going to contact them anytime soon.
[00:33:02] Kerry: I don’t want to. If I ever wanna have a relationship with somebody, like I’m a very good mediator in some ways growing up in the environment that I did.
[00:33:13] Kerry: And if you wanna have any headway, smashing him with a sledgehammer ain’t gonna be the best way. And if I come in against his wishes and say your father didn’t wanna tell you this, but I’m telling you, blow up his family, I don’t know how welcome that’s gonna make me. It’s his decision to tell his family.
[00:33:33] Kerry: I, I can’t it’s almost like outing somebody in the L G B T Q, it’s not my place. And furthermore I haven’t told my own father.
[00:33:48] Alexis: So your father doesn’t know. Okay.
[00:33:50] Kerry: Now that he’s here, this man that I had no relationship with my whole life, and I’m taking care of him, and my eldest brother is dead.
[00:34:01] Kerry: He has nobody left. There’s nobody, I’m not taking more children away from him. I’m not I’m not bringing him back 40 years in pain to a woman who just, I don’t wanna take it away from him. He’s got so little. The man is almost suicidal on a daily basis. He’s got very little to live for. He’s old, he knows he’s done wrong.
[00:34:31] Kerry: And it would just be cruel. I’m the only thing he has. And then I feel to him that I’m Charity, I’m taking care of him at a charity, and I’m not, I’m taking care of him because regardless of how shitty of parents they were they taught me something about loyalty and family, which is why I wanna get I, I never got the family I wanted, and I think I put too much hope into finding a better family on the other side.
[00:35:00] Kerry: And that’s not there either. Yeah. And you know what? I already got one dad that didn’t want me. I don’t want a second one.
[00:35:11] Alexis: Yeah. Oh, I’m so sorry. That’s so painful. That’s so painful.
[00:35:15] Kerry: It’s remarkably and everybody in my life seems to not get that.
[00:35:21] Alexis: That’s what I was going to ask is what’s, what is the reaction of your family your children, your husband?
[00:35:28] Kerry: Everybody agrees not to tell my dad, with the exception of a few people. There’s very few people, and I’m actually one of them. It depends on the day. So much of me feels like he does have a right to know that he was right. He beats himself up now for how terrible he was as a father, and I’m not gonna take that away.
[00:35:48] Kerry: He was still a bad father, regardless of if you knew or not. That’s what you shouldn’t have done that, but it might be a little validating to know that you were right. But I don’t, again, he’s old. Everybody he loves is dead. His one son is dead. His other son might as well be dead.
[00:36:08] Kerry: He’s a VA and many other things. Yeah it’s a double-edged sword because in some ways it’s yeah, we deserve to know the truth. On the other side of it, it is very painful and for somebody who’s older
[00:36:25] Kerry: and back to the drama queen aspect, I’m not kidding. Like he’s still living in Vietnam. He’s still living in, my mother didn’t love me.
[00:36:34] Kerry: My mother raised me as her sister. He’s still living in all sorts of pain from years ago. Everything is fresh and new. I. We’re gonna add on that. And it’s just another thing, and then is he gonna let me take care of him? What’ll happen then? So you don’t wish to have a relationship with your biological father now, based on his reaction,
[00:36:58] Kerry: he would have to show me.
[00:37:01] Kerry: A different moral character. I’ve spent my life in secrets and lies, and I’ve devoted my life to being against that. There’s a reason I disowned my own family for almost 20 years to get away from the drama and the madness and the lies and the craziness. And I raised my kids on this. The worst thing you could ever do in the world is lie to me.
[00:37:22] Kerry: And we went down this path and I. Almost 30 years of therapy. I help people. I turned my life around I don’t want this. I want a normal life. And if you wanna talk to me, I don’t believe in one way relationships. I don’t believe in secrets and lies. You’re gonna have to come clean with your family.
[00:37:49] Kerry: You’re gonna have to accept it. I have a right to know them. If they don’t wanna know me, that’s fine, but they should have that choice and they’re gonna get it when you die because I said that very blunt. That’s my other thing. I can’t help it. And what was his reaction to that? He is not a reactive man and says, I could see why you would feel that way.
[00:38:12] Kerry: And I can’t even digest what he says. It’s all so much emotion when I’m. But mostly it’s always, it always brings it back to God or how he’s, sorry. And he’s just he’s unsure how to deal with things or how to move forward to be patient and to give him time. And I do all those things. I don’t contact him.
[00:38:34] Kerry: I respect his wishes. I wait. Quietly. Did he tell you anything more about his relationship with your
[00:38:42] Kerry: mother? No, very little. There was no love story. He doesn’t even have much memories that he can reflect on other than to, say, yes it happened, but it probably only once, he don’t, because he doesn’t remember it, you know so much.
Which, okay. I don’t.
[00:39:06] Kerry: To him. I think that he feels like God is punishing him. He won’t say that, but he is more than once said that, I’m a prophet of his sinful past, his sinful ways is, like he doesn’t see how hurtful that is. I’m not sin I’m, and I’m not a product of one. People having sex is not a sin, right?
[00:39:33] Kerry: I was born after the sexual revolution. You come to terms with this, everything has sex except for the don’t, but we do. This is and not only is it not a sin, it’s human like you did something so very human. So very human that it. Created another human. Yeah. Okay. You weren’t faithful to your wife, but okay.
[00:40:05] Kerry: God says you shouldn’t do this, but you still didn’t this happen, like I, I don’t understand how 45 years later it could be so hard to say I did this and I said that to him on the last conversation I had with him again about eight, nine weeks ago. I said I know you feel that I’m putting a lot of pressure on you here to open up and do the right thing.
[00:40:32] Kerry: I said, but whether you realize it or not, my concern is for you, like I’m thinking right now, I’m thinking as a wife, if my husband came to me and told me he had a child years ago that didn’t know about and genuinely didn’t know because by the way, my mom didn’t tell him, my mom just stopped talking to him.
[00:40:54] Kerry: Okay. And in the seventies, how is she gonna know? Unless she specifically had never had sex with my dad, and only had sex with this one guy. They didn’t have DNA tests back then. If it was just a one time or two time fling, she probably thought it was my dad’s. There’s no way to know, so she just put it out. I’m sure my mom just put it out of her head and didn’t think of it. I never saw the guy again. That part rings true to knowing my mom. So if my husband came to me and said that he had this child that he never knew about, just found out to, I would absolutely be forgiving what was to forgive.
[00:41:28] Kerry: I didn’t even know you. He didn’t neglect you. Did you not tell me that you have a child that you didn’t know about and you found out four months ago? Now we have a problem. What do mean you out four months ago? Four months? How can you not say anything?
[00:41:49] Kerry: It’s be to tell them, because now you gotta say, I’ve known for a year. I’ve known for that would make me mad. I think you’re good in the beginning, but the longer you get, like I am urging you to tell somebody because you can’t keep it in. And if you believe the things you say you believe about God.
[00:42:13] Kerry: I don’t know how you sit in church every Sunday. I don’t know how you counsel other people about their sins. How are you doing this? And those conversations tend to push ’em away, because it, the conversations keep getting further and further apart. But I’m not force. You can’t force somebody.
[00:42:33] Kerry: To do the right thing. That’s you. That really is, because I think especially when you’re on this side of it and you want that radical honesty, I think it can be challenging to perpetuate
[00:42:48] Kerry: that. And I so badly wanna know. My other siblings. And family and Okay. Maybe we notice us are like anything, I don’t know.
[00:42:58] Kerry: None of it could work out, but how do you know? I’ve always felt like I wanted to I needed to be connected to something and I wasn’t rooted in anything and my mom has been gone so long and I don’t, I just, I wanted something to grab hold of. Yeah. It was very disappointing. I can’t forcing that is not gonna make that happen.
[00:43:21] Kerry: That’s gonna drive it away. You catch more flies with honey. But I think I’m done with him. Okay. So when he comes to me again, I think I will say, ’cause again, I’m blunt. I can’t keep it in. And he needs to know that you’ve already told me more than enough about the kind of man you are.
[00:43:43] Kerry: So I’m just gonna wait for you to pass. I’m not gonna violate your wishes, and you obviously don’t wanna disrupt your life. This isn’t something you’re willing to face head on. So I’m gonna let it go for now and appreciate it if you just leave me be, because otherwise I’m gonna sit here wondering when is the phone gonna ring?
[00:44:03] Kerry: When is he gonna call me again? And I am, I’m counting weeks. This is ridiculous. It’s been eight weeks. It’s every Friday. It’s another week. I don’t wanna do that. Again, I’m with one father that didn’t want me I can’t put myself through this again. So I’d like to put you outta my head for now. And so I, but I can’t tell him that until the next time he calls me.
[00:44:26] Alexis: Oh, that’s so frustrating.
[00:44:29] Kerry: And I was gonna do it the last time. But every time he calls, I wanna give him the opportunity to be like, I told someone and he just won’t. Yeah. And it’s I don’t wanna be a dark, dirty secret. You are not. You’re not.
[00:44:43] Kerry: And that’s how I was conceived. It just makes it more offensive.
[00:44:47] Alexis: Where would you say that you are at with the journey? It sounds like you’re done with your biological father unless he makes some radical changes. What are your feelings toward your mother?
[00:44:57] Kerry: It’s funny. I was angry very briefly. But I can’t hold onto it. It’s like trying to cup water in your hands.
[00:45:07] Kerry: It’s full for a second and then it drains and it’s so much because I know what it’s like to feel alone in an empty marriage. I know what it’s like to not want to go home at night and wish you had a different life. I know what it’s like to not feel loved. My mother didn’t know her father. She didn’t know where she came from herself.
[00:45:32] Kerry: Her mother was a very cold, forbidding woman. I just, I have been through a very rough life, and that has made me a deeply compassionate person, not just towards my mother, but towards everybody. In some of my worst, most horrible times, there was never anybody there for me. I was alone very young and. I never wanted that for anybody.
[00:46:01] Kerry: Like I, I literally can’t sleep at night if I know that there’s somebody I, this, confirmed somebody I know in pain and I can’t I’m not helping somehow as a mother, I can’t fathom the choices that my mother made. My mother did things I would never do. My mother didn’t do things that I would do every day of the week.
[00:46:27] Kerry: But when I think of my mom, I don’t think of her like a mother. I. I think of the way she held me when I was at the beach ’cause I was scared or the way the sun shined in her eyes. She’s been gone for so long. I just, it’s like the little girl in me yearns for that ’cause that was the only thing that loved me growing up.
[00:46:53] Kerry: My family was not close, but my mother loved me. I knew my mother loved me and I knew my mother. I knew that feeling and that scent, and those are the things that I think about when I think about my mom. I don’t think about what a terrible mother she was, because truly she put everything before us. She was not the best mother in the world in many ways, and she was a drunk, but she loved me so purely in a way that honestly, nobody has ever loved me and in my life, nothing she did wrong bothered me anymore because she was just trying to live and she was in pain.
[00:47:29] Kerry: I can’t stand to see anybody in pain. And we’re all in pain. It’s the most confounding thing in the whole world. We all have our own pain. And it’s different. Always different, but it’s always the same. Yeah. It’s always the pain of death, grief. There’s always the joy of life births. Complex web of everything that confounds me into speechlessness, but into nonsensical babbling about how the universe is profound.
[00:48:09] Kerry: We’re all connected by our experiences that are also different, but also the same, just living, trying to survive. And not hurt and be loved. They just wanna be loved.
[00:48:27] Alexis: So true. Oh, thank you for sharing that. That was really beautiful. That was really beautiful. needed to hear that, so I’m sure that somebody listening needs to hear that too, so thank you.
[00:48:41] Alexis: What advice would you give to parents who may be keeping a DNA surprise secret from their child?
[00:48:51] Kerry: I think that every experience is different. No cookie cutter answer is going to fit every situation. You have to take so many things into consideration because truth is not just a right, but it’s a responsibility, and it can be a weapon, a dangerous one.
[00:49:22] Kerry: Not everybody’s capable. You gotta think like Jack Nicholson. You can’t handle the truth, right? Not everybody can man. Like really? Truly not everybody’s mentally or emotionally stable. Not everybody is admitted. The truth to themselves. Self-awareness is a struggle for us all. And not all of us even know we’re on that struggling path.
[00:49:49] Kerry: We’re not trying to be self-aware. And for you to literally change somebody’s reality, you have to take that as a responsibility of utmost care and it’s not right for everybody.
[00:50:10] Alexis: That’s a really interesting perspective.
[00:50:12] Kerry: Yeah, and I think if somebody’s asking questions, then they have a right to the answer, but other than that, the truth should be taken carefully.
[00:50:22] Kerry: Everything depends. I’m not telling my dad, but everybody knows, but my dad and my dad was the one who knew in the beginning. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What advice would you give someone like us, somebody who’s discovered that they are an
[00:50:40] Kerry: NPE? Go online and find support groups, and I say online because they’re almost impossible to find, the support has been the most. Just, obviously some people have to do the whole, I gotta find out where I come from and track down their ancestry and maybe I want to insist, I want to visit, like I always wanted to go to Ireland, now I wanna go to Portugal, I always want Italy.
[00:51:09] Kerry: I still wanna go to Italy. Yeah.
[00:51:12] Alexis: It’s been really interesting. Almost everyone that I’ve spoken to who’s an NPE, has this primal urge to visit where they originated. Culturally and everything in a way that I don’t hear so much from people who are not NPEs. And I think that’s really interesting.
[00:51:30] Kerry: I think it’s because we’ve spent so much of our life not feeling a connection that you want that physical place to lay your hand and go, this is where I am from, where I know years and years of progress made this happen. And there’s something very deep and primal in that urge to know where you are from, to feel connected to something.
[00:52:02] Kerry: And even when people die, you’ll see very often, either they have the urn, the cremation, they’ll touch the urn, or they’ll go to the grave and they’ll put your hand right on the grave. That’s where they are. That’s where your connection, your, it’s where your soul is. You feel it inside. That thing that science can’t explain, that soul of essence.
[00:52:28] Kerry: You need to feel connected to that. And after feeling disconnected from our own families for so long, my, my biggest advice is to do anything that gives you that feeling. Whatever that is. If that means you need to talk to other people. If that means you need to make a scrapbook and then bury that scrapbook and never talk about it ever again.
[00:52:49] Kerry: If that means that you need to do an entire ancestry, DNA documentary and start interviewing celebrities about how you’re related to them all, then do it. Whatever it is you need to do. Yeah. To give you that feeling that you’ve known void in your entire life. And I have that. I have that filled already.
[00:53:10] Kerry: I don’t need my biological dad now knowing, just knowing forgiveness is so important and you’re not gonna feel better until you let go of the anger anyway. Anger festers. Yeah. And you wouldn’t be here. Like you wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that and showed whatever lies, whatever came from that you’re here.
[00:53:38] Kerry: And you can do things differently. And that actually is my number one lesson in life, is never let other people’s behavior determine your own. Yes. That’s so true. I think especially for us that are breaking those generational cycles.
[00:53:55] Kerry: Yeah. Yeah. We all know all of our secrets are out now. Not all of them, but I still don’t know who my mom’s dad is.
[00:54:03] Kerry: I think actually that is my next part of my journey is getting one of those DNA angels to seek out my mom’s biological father so we can find out, where we come from there.
[00:54:17] Alexis: Oh, that’d be amazing. Yeah. Good luck with that. I’ll get the answers she never had. Yeah. Kerry, thank you so much for being so generous with your story.
[00:54:27] Alexis: I think that your perspective on everything is so wise and reasonable and fair to everyone involved, and it’s really nice. To hear that perspective and to hear somebody that’s emerged from the other side of some of the anger and initial feelings that so many of us have when we first make the discovery.
[00:54:48] Kerry: I thank you for reaching out and I am more than honored to be, a participant in this podcast and share my story and hopefully somebody else can take comfort in knowing that there is. Many ways that you can see the same story, and it is the same for all of us, even if it’s different.