Penny’s DNA Surprise

This transcript was generated automatically. Its accuracy may vary.

Speaker 1

Hi, it's Alexis from DNA Surprises.

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Since then, we've created an amazing community.

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Thank

Speaker 2

But I think especially my mother and and fortunately I was really really angry at my mother for a long time and now I'm I'm not and that's really nice.

I I I'm not.

You know, real happy with it, but I but I have total understanding now which again it's this kind of progression of truth, understanding compassion, you know in in different doses along the way.

But it's a for me it's a linear progression.

Imagine spitting into a tube, sending off your DNA, and unknowingly turning your life upside down for me.

And thousands of others.

This is our reality.

I'm your host, Alexis Ourselt.

In July of 2021, I discovered that I'm an N P/E, someone who has experienced a non paternal event.

In other words, my biological father isn't who I thought he was.

This podcast shares the journeys of people who are shocked by a DNA discovery, mostly through modern DNA testing.

We're telling the stories of N P/E's adoptees and donor conceived people and their families.

This is DNA surprises.

Many folks who experience ADNA Surprise share a feeling of being the black sheep of their families, of never quite fitting in, and in some cases being actively ostracized by their family of origin.

In this week's episode, Penny shares her complicated family history.

And why her NPE validated her outsider status within the family.

She reflects on the gaslighting and neglect she experienced as a child, and how she uncovered the truth with the power of her own intuition.

Thank you for sharing your story, Penny.

My name is.

Penelope, but most people know me as Penny.

I am 58, I think, yeah, I'm 58 and I'm originally from Maine and Ohio, but I currently live in Europe.

For me, it wasn't the testing First I I didn't sort of randomly test like many people do and find out I I kind of tested.

To confirm something that I've been trying to sort out for all of my life.

So there was for me.

Then there was a bit of a build up to it.

I was born in Ohio in 1964.

I was the youngest of six children.

My birth certificate father at the time was the ordained Methodist minister, although he had left.

The church and his church shortly before I was born and went on to do some other things that we went back to the church and my mother was basically a homemaker, though she was later a teacher and then later a nurse.

In any case, they were both from Cleveland, OH, and they were married in 1949.

And then they had the first four children in the six of us.

Between, say 195152 and 1957.

And then the sister that's born three years older than myself was born in 61 and I was born in 64.

And I just want to give an overview of that because I I kind of feel like the the family dynamics of my story are made a little bit more complex by so many characters so.

They spent their early the early years of the marriage in in Boston.

Well, he was in seminary and then he got his first church in a small town in Maine.

So they moved there in the mid to late well in the mid 50s.

And my mother was there with this, these four children in the small main town at the Parsonage while he was.

In seminary in Boston during the week and then in the later 50s he moved to another church in southern Maine and was the Co pastor at another church with someone else.

So and that's where my sister who's three years older was born.

And then I would have been conceived in Maine in 1963 but I was born in Ohio in 1964.

The the church story is kind of important for a number of reasons just because of the kind of.

Moral, religious.

We are good people aspect of it.

When they moved back to Ohio when I was born in 64, they lived there until 71 and he was not working as a minister and they fought a lot in my early childhood.

My most of my memories are from my early childhood in Ohio.

But then also when they had had the churches in Maine they had bought land on a.

On a island in a lake there and built a camp in Maine.

So we spent all of our summers in Maine at the camp and and those were glorious summers that was really really glorious.

But then in 1971 or thereabouts they've been fighting a lot and my mother's I woke up one morning my mother had suddenly disappeared and so I would have been six years old and.

That was really traumatic for me.

But I had these five older siblings and this this father, so they were all destroyed as well.

The oldest sister was already out of the house and living in Maine, and my mother had left and gone to Maine to live by herself for a while, so she'd left the family.

OK, so she had some some sort of.

Event or need.

And she left the entire family to be alone.

Yeah, yeah.

And you know it.

It's funny because it it, it's such a, it's such a pivotal experience, but it was completely glossed over in our childhood.

You know, there was an excuse that her mother was too controlling.

She had to get away from her mother, that they had to do work at the camp, so someone had to be there.

But she was there long enough and on her own that she actually got a job.

And and lived there for most of the year.

But she came back at Christmas and when she came back at Christmas it was it was not a whole lot better.

They were still fighting a lot but from that time they started to tell this dollhouse story and and I'll get back to the dollhouse.

But it's significant to me and that it really illustrates some of the how things happened in my family with regard to myself.

So the dollhouse story is that my mother came back for Christmas and my father.

Birth certificate father had made this dollhouse for me and that everybody was mad at me because because I didn't show any emotion and I didn't thank him for this dollhouse.

And I've heard my sisters tell the story and laugh at how they were all angry with me and I've never really understood it and I'd always.

Kind of shrug my shoulders because I have no memory of it whatsoever, but it seems to gloss over a lot of what was really going on.

I mean, for me, when I think back at that time I I remember it is that I stopped talking.

I I don't think I ever trusted anyone.

After that, again, I was, I was in really, really bad shape.

And I know my teachers complained, but I don't know who was taking care of me because I don't think anybody was really taking care of me because in.

In our family, there was very much this idea that the kids to some extent take care of the parents, and so they were very focused on my birth certificate father and kind of taking care of him.

And in that respect too, I always felt that it was a little bit like growing up in a cult because he was a central figure and there could be no criticism of him.

So during this time that your mom is gone.

Everyone's caretaking your father.

That was my impression, Yeah.

Yeah.

And.

And I was a quiet kid and I read a lot.

I kind of tried to fly under the radar.

But from that time on, I I think I begin to recognize or or or notice that my family, they didn't like me.

They just didn't like me and my birth certificate father didn't like to engage with me and and it was easy to kind of overlook that or be told that no, that's not the way it is because when there are so many figures involved, you know nobody gets a lot of attention and as the youngest you know nobody you know there there aren't as many baby pictures of you etc etc.

But it it was different.

My mother used to call me her.

Baby not there.

Baby and my oldest siblings didn't seem to like me, in part because they said she spoiled me and I was her favorite.

But she also abandoned me.

So from that time on, I certainly didn't feel like I was her favorite.

And I and I really didn't trust her at all after that.

And I mean, I don't think anybody noticed that I basically stopped talking, but I but I remember kind of clutching my teeth as a child and thinking, you know, I'm never going to let anyone near me again because this is just.

Too painful.

Then she came back in the spring and announced that we were all moving to Maine.

So this didn't go over very well with the three older ones who were still in high school.

The oldest one was already in Maine.

My oldest sister, I would have to add if I was 6 and 71.

She would have.

Well, she's 13 years older, so she was really out of the house.

And the sister who's three years older, she probably didn't care either.

You know, adventure, we're going to going to Maine.

So we piled in her VW Bug.

They actually told my two brothers, who are the two middle of the first four.

They hitchhiked from Ohio to Maine and our parents let them and we moved to Maine, but we moved to Maine, to this, to a camp, to an uninsulated.

Summer camp.

And so that summer was really, it was exciting and that was fun because there were lots of people around.

My mother was very animated.

You could almost imagine that was she was manic, and I think some people have suggested that, but I don't think so.

Anyway, there are lots of people around and my birth certificate father was there.

Apparently he had quit his job to build more on the House to winterize at the camp and.

So it was all very exciting.

And then in the fall everybody left and we registered for school and the main winter starts.

So this was not a solution to their marriage, because then the next years were even worse and as I've been kind of peeling back my story, I'm able to get closer to.

Why a lot of this has been such such a damaging event for me because it's over the course of a lifetime.

But in those years when we first moved up to Maine, I was, I was very young.

And after that summer something happened that was very bad, that I think I witnessed was some sort of argument or something that I can't, I couldn't quite get a hold of.

But something happened.

And so when?

When winter started, then both my mother and my birth certificate father seemed to find me really toxic.

I had been my mother's favorite, maybe, but neither of them wanted anything to do with me.

The sister who was three years older would have been about 9:00 or 10:00, and she hated me.

I never knew why, but she she really hated me.

Because I was toxic they they left us at this camp and I still can't quite get my head around how this worked because they were educated, white middle class parents from, you know, normal, well semi normal families, however normal any family can be.

But those years were very grim.

The the place was unheated.

We were left often without food.

So you are.

You're 6-7 years old at this time.

I would have been 6 and 71 when we moved there, yeah.

So I'd say between the ages of say 7 and 12, things were very, very bad.

And so when you say that your parents saw you as toxic?

Why do you think that?

Or or what led you to believe like?

Was there a reason in your mind of why your mother turned?

At the time, no.

But later, when I learned more about the story, I I I think I understand why now.

Yeah, I'm so sorry that happened to you.

That's awful.

Yeah, it really was awful.

You know, it's it's, it's funny because unpacking it now when you're older.

It is is almost a relief and a blessing and and healing because I think I couldn't do that as a child or even as a as a young adult.

And so we wrote that off as well.

Tough childhood.

That's Maine poverty and rural Maine.

I mean we weren't the only ones, you know, it was sort of like, you know when everybody around you is like that.

We didn't know we were poor.

Except that we did know we were poor because we were a white, middle class family from suburban Ohio, and my parents knew better.

But whatever was going on was more important to them than our well-being.

So just an an immense amount of neglect.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which, of course.

I I'm, I, I, I have a hard time Speaking of it because I know I'm going to be punished for it from some quarter.

You know, you're not allowed to speak the truth for me.

These things loomed large and I knew they happened.

But I had, you know, 22 parents, two adults and five siblings above me who who swore that none of this happened, who would swear to me that's not what happened.

That's that's not what happened.

You were too young.

You don't remember.

So I heard that all my life.

By the time I was 12, I was, I was in pretty rough shape.

But you know, maybe it's the it's the preservation of of the self in that you know, you do soldier on and you do make the best of it.

So then when I was 15, my birth certificate father had a heart attack, but he survived it.

Around the same time or shortly thereafter, my mother pulled me aside and and sort of told me on.

On her own or on my own without other people around, she said.

Well, this friend of the family has died, and I wasn't close to my mother because I hadn't trusted her since she left us in Ohio.

But there was a time in the summers when she had taken me to the coast with her to visit this man who was a family friend, who had been a congregant in the first church.

And we used to go visit him at his cabin on the ocean.

And sometimes she'd bring all the kids and sometimes just the two of us.

And she always tried to encourage this kind of special relationship that I should have with him.

And she actually had pictures at one time of all of us together.

And he over the years had.

He was a great Carpenter and over the years he had, he had built her all sorts of things.

He built a cradle for my middle sister when she was born.

He built a beautiful swing that she arranged us all on in the summer to have the Christmas.

Picture taken for the family Christmas card.

My mother was quite brazen in some respects.

What did you think of this, this man?

Do you remember what you what your impression was of him at the time?

Yes, his name was Herb and I can say that and and my impressions were really good.

I have no.

Real memory of what he was like.

But but I have feeling memory, memory feeling.

And the feeling was positive.

They've long since disappeared.

I don't know what she did with them, but at one time when I was younger, when I was still living in Ohio I believe, but not after that summer, she used to show me pictures of us together and me with him.

And in her memoirs that she wrote later I can see some of the pictures that like half of an arm.

Or a leg Is him in these pictures?

Because there were never many pictures of me anyway, as a baby or as a young young girl.

But she had these pictures of the three of us that she used to show me.

I think my mother was grooming me to leave her family and take me with her and go to live with this man.

But.

I, you know, I have no confirmation of that.

So 79, I was 15, she said, well, he's he's died and I was.

I was upset about it, but I didn't show any emotion towards her.

And he had been one of these figures in the background as a family friend and one of these church figures.

And I had no idea that he was related to all these other figures in different ways, but that kind of came out later.

Your childhood obviously was.

Extremely traumatic through neglect, gaslighting and abuse.

And you mentioned in the beginning that you took your DNA test for confirmation.

Not that was not where you made your discovery.

At what point do you learn that your raised father is a birth certificate father and not your biological father?

Well yes, let us jump ahead.

So just quickly when I when I finished high school I just, I bought a one way ticket to London and I started hitchhiking around Europe and I stayed away for a year and I recognized pretty quickly that I was better off when I wasn't around my family.

But I kept going back trying to figure this out.

So.

I went to university and I was back and forth between here in Europe or the US and Europe several times.

And then by the time I was in my early 30s, I wasn't really doing a whole lot, but I was still battling.

It's so hard to subscribe when you're so subjective, You know, we're caught in our own subjective reality and we don't have a frame of reference for what's normal.

And I was, you know, I was.

I was really.

Well, I was basically gaslighted all my life.

But but you're told, you know you come from a good family, they're good people you're this, you're that, etcetera, etcetera.

So I didn't really understand why I was continually unhappy and angry and I try this is, this is what kind of breaks my heart is that I spent so many years trying to figure out what was wrong.

Quote With me, UN quote.

Because there was, there was never anything wrong with me right when I had therapy and I, you know, I I wasn't really ever depressed per se, but I was angry and I was confused.

So by my early 30s I was getting out of a longish, the longest relationship I ever had and I had lost my job and and this was 1996 and I was kind of just going through a really rough patch.

And I thought, well, right, I have nothing to lose here.

I'm.

I was back living in the area where all my other my five siblings lived and my parents lived.

And yet that sister who was three years older, for example, she was, she was horrible to me.

She would plan family outings and and parties and this and that.

And I would never be invited and and nobody ever said anything.

They would always say, well, that's between you and her, you've always had a thing, blah, blah, blah.

And it wasn't that we always had a thing, it was that.

She hated me.

I I didn't have a thing with her.

She just didn't ever like me.

And so they they just said, well that's, you know, between you 2 and go to the parties and I would be left out.

So I confronted my birth certificate father and you know, I thought it was my father.

I had no reason to believe otherwise.

And so when I confronted him, I didn't ask him, why don't you love me?

Because I assumed that he was my father and you love your child.

So I asked why don't you like me?

And we argued for about two days, a couple of hours each day, and I absolutely bared my soul.

I was in tears and I said, look, I accept that you don't like me.

I just want to know why.

And he was so angry with me.

And I never saw him get angry at anyone else.

I mean, he was known as this beloved figure in the community, very charismatic, and he was really angry.

So what are you talking about?

That's not true, blah blah, blah.

But you know, I could cite over a whole lifetime, event after event after event, things I had done to engage with him to, I mean.

Here I live in Europe.

I learned Germany because I thought he was German, but nothing.

He was so angry at me.

At one point he by the third day he turned to me and and he he said, he said, what the Hell's wrong with you anyway?

What, are you gonna grow up?

And of course my response was, do you even know how old I am?

Do you know when my birthday is?

Do you remember when I was born?

And it was like like this instant transformation.

And he just looked haggard.

He just looked really haggard.

And so he kind of shifted gears.

And then he said, well, I I guess I can understand why you feel that way.

I mean, you know, he'd been totally angry with me.

And he said, oh, well, you know, let me try to give you a hug.

And and and that I hadn't even been angry before, but that just angered me.

And I said no.

I don't want a hug.

I want to know why you don't like me, and we left it at that.

So he never gave you an answer?

Never gave me an answer.

That was in February of 1996 and a day or two after that they left for Florida and within a week he had dropped dead of a heart attack.

Oh my gosh.

So we remain when we got this phone call and my sister screamed at me, my oldest sister and.

That you know, you killed him, You caused him so much stress.

You were always arguing with them.

And this was a refrain that I heard throughout my childhood.

Penny's causing trouble again because I asked questions, because I pointed out hypocrisies or?

How did you feel when you found out that your birth certificate father had passed?

Well, to be honest, I was.

I was angry and confused.

It wasn't that I didn't have any feelings for him, but there would be times when I would look at him throughout my childhood and just think, I don't feel any connection to this man whatsoever.

And I always thought it was because he, he rejected me so much.

So he died.

And that was in 1996.

And then I left the US and I've never lived in the US since because I thought.

There's no point if if, if I'm going to, if I'm ever going to find out what's wrong here, he's this great moral authority and he would tell me and he's not going to tell me.

And and I was distraught by his death.

I felt very sad.

I mean, he wasn't an evil man.

He just didn't like me.

So I was only ever home once every two to four years for no more than 10 days to two weeks.

So then around nine 2010, he died, in 96, Around 2010, I had a child in between, so I was busy.

But around 2010 I I had decided because this problem wasn't going away and I had decided I was really going to try to concentrate really hard on trying to figure out those those years of my childhood that I didn't have good memories for and that I was trying to figure out something happened.

From the time we left Ohio in those early years in Maine.

And so I I started having these memories of visiting this man at this camp down on the ocean of visiting Herb who was this old family friend.

And Herb had been married to Norma, and I hadn't known that because I had known as a when I was older that Norma was married to someone else and I hadn't even known that this woman who had been in.

My birth certificate father's youth group when she was 16, was Herb's daughter.

So I didn't, I didn't understand, I didn't know any of this.

But anyway, so I said to my mother, um, why were we visiting Herb?

I'm having all these memories of these early childhood memories and you know, we're sitting in on the lake in the summer and my mother.

Wouldn't look at me and she she just, she's just sounded really disgusted with me.

And she said no, no, I said, mom, why?

Why am I having these memories?

Who was this guy?

Why did we go visit him?

And she said, well, you know, he was just an old family friend, blah blah, blah.

And then this is one of these experiences and I have several other others in which it it was like something dropped into my head and came out my mouth before I could really.

Consider what it was and what came out of my mouth was.

I said mom was was hurt my father and and I was kind of shocked myself but I was so confused I didn't even know where it came from and my mother wouldn't look at me and she said why would you think something like that?

She was completely disgusted with me.

Why would you think something like that?

That's crazy.

You're really crazy.

Gaslighting 101, right?

Yeah, so that was about 2010.

And then I came back a couple years later, 2012.

We're driving along in the car, beautiful back roads of Maine in the summer.

And again, and I wasn't, I wasn't angry because I had no idea what I was doing.

But I said, mom, I keep having these memories of visiting Herb at his cabin with you.

Why did we go to visit him?

She was sitting beside me and she started screaming and she started screaming.

You're abusing me.

Stop abusing me or I'm going to have Bobby charge you with elder abuse.

My my brother, one of my brothers is an attorney and and I I I was, I was so shocked that I I had to pull over and I looked at her and and she was smiling.

She was sitting there smiling after this.

Outrageous outburst.

She was smiling.

I got out of the car and I just kind of fell to my knees.

I didn't.

I didn't really know what was happening.

But I think something kind of shifted inside of me.

But again, what?

What could it be?

What could be happening?

And so that was 2012.

But after that, I I couldn't.

I wouldn't say that I hated my mother, but I couldn't stand her.

I it was almost like a physical revulsion.

I I couldn't look at her.

I couldn't speak to her.

I couldn't.

I didn't even want it.

I didn't want to touch her.

And I don't even think that I hugged her goodbye and that that summer was the last time I saw her alive.

So she died in 2014 and I was in Spain at the time and my middle sister called me.

She was the only one I still had any sort of brief contact with.

And she said, well, the others didn't want to tell you at all, but I.

College you and you know, and she's died.

So I flew home with my 10 year old son.

At the funeral my siblings largely ignored me that they were really cold and then I was getting the boxes together to get out of the family house where I was also staying and and my brother just screamed at me kind of out of nowhere said get your things out of the house.

You're you're never allowed back here again.

You got to get everything else, everything out.

We were only nice to you because mom was alive.

I was even nice to your son.

And it's it's over now.

And my son was standing, was, was right there and two of my girlfriends were there.

It was just like out of nowhere.

And it was just so mean.

So I got all my stuff together.

I pet, you know, they were just maybe 20 boxes of old college papers and childhood mementos and things like that.

And my two girlfriends.

This is another thing.

I mean, I can't be that horrible of a person because I've been so blessed to have such wonderful friends throughout my life.

Wonderful, wonderful people.

That was kind of that.

That was 2014.

And then I went back to my home in Europe and we were at our little house in the countryside in France and working in the garden.

And suddenly again this thing kind of fell into my brain.

And it was the name of the son of the man we used to visit at this cabin, and he was three years younger than myself, and I had totally forgot about him.

And his name dropped into my head and I thought, oh, maybe I'll ask him what he knows because I had.

I had no particular thought.

I had no idea.

So I found him on Facebook and I emailed or I messaged him and he messaged back fairly quickly and within about 3 text messages he just said, can I be honest with you?

I said yes.

And he said, you're my half sister.

That's how I found out.

What was your reaction?

The top of my head came off and I I saw my whole life like a like a film.

Breel come out of the back of my head and I just saw it in a very different way and it was just this tremendous feeling of of relief and and vindication.

And then the anger came.

What did you do with that information after you found out?

Yeah, well, well, of course.

So I said, well, we'll do a DNA test because I'm not going to, you know, put all my eggs in this basket if there's no, you know, I've been lied to so much that I don't.

DNA doesn't lie.

But, you know, people do so.

Right.

All of my half siblings are sort of professionals who sort of depend on DNA in their work to some extent.

So they're not going to be able to deny this either.

But I knew he was right because it it made sense.

And of course, the first thing I did was, you know, become sort of an investigative journalist.

And this?

This no doubt enraged my siblings.

Um, I contacted everybody I could possibly think of to tell me what they knew.

And I went to my mother's memoirs.

My mother has had written these Crazy.

Memoirs.

It was a couple inches thick.

Her memoirs are really kind of odd.

So a chapter for each of the kids, but a chapter of, you know, for each of the sort of decades of our life as a family together.

No mention of birth father Herb at all, but my mother for all her intelligence in terms of her ability to manipulate.

And a good dose of cruelty.

And much of that was not a particularly courageous woman, she writes in this sort of nostalgic, romantic tone of voice.

And you know.

Oh, the things we learn along the way and oh, we had hard times, but we always made it through as the family, blah blah blah.

But I I mean, I've spent a lot of my my life working with text and writing and words and so when I look at a text, I look at the the entirety of it, how it's written, the tone, the style, etcetera, but also what's included and what's not included.

And she's.

She's very odd about the things she included.

So of course, the first thing I did was go back to her memoirs and figure out what was happening when I was conceived and what was happening when I was conceived.

Yeah, boom, there it was, right in the middle of the page.

They were living in this town in Maine.

It would have been the summer of 1963, but there was a there was a picture of.

Her and my birth certificate father and these five children ranged around them.

She has a little pillbox hat and he's sleeked back hair and a suit coat very 1950s and and it was a picture that she had cut out so that she cut out the date purposely without cutting out the headline and it was a announcement that he was leaving that church suddenly and.

She writes, and nowhere else in her memoirs does she write exact dates.

But in this chapter she wrote, We left Maine in June of 1963, and I immediately knew that couldn't be right.

It couldn't be right because who's going to move to Ohio, to suburban Ohio with five kids in the heat of the summer when you can stay at the camp at Maine?

So of course it wasn't right.

So I went back and I found the original newspaper article and it was September and so I was already pregnant.

She was already pregnant with me.

But the the real boom about the story is that she doesn't say why they left this church, but there's a whole paragraph describing that she was angry because the Co pastor and had fallen in love with her.

With my birth certificate father with her husband and it made her really angry.

And then she went into this paragraph about this man in later years turned out to be homosexual, but they didn't know what at the time.

But they knew that his wife had left him at, which must have been a huge scandal in 1963 because she was a lesbian and she writes lesbian with a capital L.

And went to live with another woman and and it it hit me like boom.

Because if this were the only clue, then it might be a little less powerful.

But my mother, within the context of her character and knowing her all my life was obsessed with homosexuality and she would make these comments.

She wasn't.

She didn't condemn, she wasn't moralizing.

And she had plenty of friends who were.

Leslies.

And so she had this weird thing and then before she died, she was desperately trying.

I remember her hand shaking as she was handing me this packet of letters and she said read these, I want you to read these.

And it was a packet of letters from this other com minister to my birth certificate father and I assumed they were probably love letters, but I didn't read them because it was before I was born.

So I think what happened was that she had a secret on him and he had a secret on her.

So they had a secret together and they kept it up because she had a a long relationship with my birth certificate father and they were people who would have been mortified by the reality of their lives.

That summer, what happened?

I found out from my new half sibling brother.

I have three older siblings, new new, older sisters.

One of them had already died.

The oldest one is is quite a character.

She's the only other person besides the half brother who I found out who knew definitively because she had found a letter from my mother on the kitchen table of her father, our father in Maine.

A letter from my mother in Ohio saying she was pregnant with me and and apparently sort of gushing about it and how excited she was and blah blah blah and.

This new older sister just looked at me like, Oh my God, he must have thought she was crazy.

And because this was not going to come out, this was not.

He was not going to have anything to do with this.

I mean, you know, he might have been a womanizer, but I'm sure he was not interested in a church scandal or anything else.

So what happened, apparently, that summer?

The new wife of my younger new half brother went to the camp and apparently lots of people were there and just confronted my mother and said leave my leaves, my husband alone and that my birth certificate father was also there.

And yeah, and I I I think I might have witnessed that.

I I'm not exactly sure and I'm not exactly sure how it went down or what exactly happened, but it seems to me that those two men.

Fixed her up.

Good in the sense that they shut down the whole relationship.

I never saw him again after that.

We never went to visit him again.

I never saw him and we had visited him regularly.

How did you feel to hear that your, your brother, your newfound half brother knew?

Well, to tell you the truth, and I've not expressed that to him because I don't think it's it's necessary or relevant.

I I was a little bit angry.

I was angry and I was disappointed, but my oldest hat new half sister is in her 80s, she just matter of factly said.

Well, I assumed they told you and he said the same thing, but he's a few years younger than myself.

But he is a interesting character.

We're not really in contact anymore for mostly different political views that seem to be a problem for him, but.

You know he he's been kind to me and he's he's told me many things but he he seemed to think that everybody acted honorably and they were just trying to protect me and he said our father herb was great friends with my birth certificate father and they were they had known each other from church and and my impression is and and I I don't have confirmation but my impression is that they kind of they put a stop to my mother and and because he did say and and my.

Oldest new half siblings said that what my mother was, I think he, my birth father, was kind of the love of her life.

But she wasn't the love of his life.

You you get the confirmation through a DNA test that this is in fact true.

The information you've been given is true.

Did you have any different emotions once you got that?

Official confirmation and you could see the data to support it.

Yes, actually.

And that's that's a really important period to cover.

I I was, I was in very, very bad shape.

And I've been selfemployed for a long time and I'm a single mother, so I had to try to keep it together as much as I could.

But I I was in very, very bad shape.

I was very, very angry, but I was also.

It's very hard to describe.

I wouldn't say that I was scared, but I I couldn't bear to look at myself.

I couldn't bear to be in my own skin.

I had this feeling like, like I was desperate, like I was trying to get out of my body.

I had to turn all my mirrors around on on the walls.

I I I couldn't.

I couldn't stand to be with myself, in part because I didn't know who I was, which is really weird because of course I knew who I was.

It was a very odd feelings and and it wasn't really fear, it was just just like being totally knocked off.

Whatever you had been on, it was like being knocked off.

You're you're not a pedestal, like you were held up to be something, but it was like being knocked off course and knocked off your feet.

But I was in very, very bad shape for about a year.

It was.

Hard to not cry all the time.

And I was.

And of course also I was very, very angry.

And at first I was very, very angry at my mother.

I'd spent my whole life trying to figure this out, right?

Like, what's wrong with me?

What's wrong with me?

And the truth was amazing.

It it, it changed my life.

But it saved my life.

So there was my life before and my life after, but I found out so late.

And and the truth has been so amazing that it's hard not to be angry and and full of grief for what could have been.

So yeah, so my my whole kind, of course was that the truth was magical, but the truth allowed me understanding.

And that's why I did as much investigating as I could.

I mean, maybe we're all like that, but I'm particularly like that.

I want to understand things.

I want to understand things really.

You know, the brass tacks people call it, maybe intellectually, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

I just want the truth.

I want the facts.

I want to know what's going on.

I'll draw my own conclusions.

Thank you very much.

And then.

This miraculous thing that I call compassion, which is not the same for me as forgiveness.

And that may be another discussion because I'm not a big person on forgiveness.

Can you can you explain that?

Can you explain that a little bit?

I can because I think I'm gonna stick to it.

And I know people say, you know, there's this whole.

Maybe American or or Western ideology that says, you know, judo, Christian, whatever that says, you know, forgiveness is all about for you and that's the basis of love and blah, blah.

I I don't feel that.

And and maybe we're just, you know, parsing words here, but compassion is sufficient for me.

There's a great book called The Sunflower.

It's like 10 essays about forgiveness and.

And I did a lot of reading about forgiveness and and forgiveness people have different feelings about it.

Forgiveness is for someone who cared for you and has done you wrong and recognizes that and and wants to make amends and it's sort of a one off deal and and these people were not they're not worthy of my forgiveness and more importantly.

That's not on me.

I I don't have that responsibility that that's not on me.

I don't even have the power for it.

Even if I wanted to, I am.

I'm not going to absolve them of of their actions.

That's on them.

I really think if I were to call it forgiveness and say I forgive them that that would do me more harm because.

To say that I have compassion and understanding now for my mother's position, despite how cruel and awful she could be, and that I have compassion and understanding for my birth certificate father as well, despite the the really destructive, horrible treatment I experienced, is enough for me.

It's it's not my place to forgive them.

I really appreciate you sharing that perspective.

Just because I think there is a lot of that discussion in our community about forgiveness now.

Both of your raised parents have passed everyone involved.

They're all dead.

What questions do you have?

I guess I would have mostly questions about my birth father because I suspect that I'm more like him, this half brother said.

He thought I looked more like him and was more like him probably than than his other children.

The problem was that in in that family of 6, including myself, that I was born into, the first five looked just like my birth certificate father, but I looked so much like my mother that it was easy to pass me off.

But when I was 15.

She convinced me to to have a nose job because I had it, I had a deviated septum so I have trouble breathing anyway.

But she said, well let's just get that done and and then they can cut off the tip so it's not quite as big and blah blah blah.

And the minute I met my sisters and show them a picture of when I when I was 15, before I had my nose done, they said oh that's his nose.

And that's those are the links my mother went to to hide this secret.

That's really.

Sick.

Why?

Yeah, that's wild.

So how you mentioned that you aren't particularly close with your newfound brother.

How is your relationship with your sisters?

Lovely.

They're lovely, lovely people.

They're wonderful.

I mean, you know, we don't have a history and they're a lot older, but but the younger one I've known since before I was born, I mean.

She was always around and the middle sister of those three died the same year my birth certificate or my birth father died.

But her daughter is is just a little bit younger than myself, so I have a new niece.

I went back to Maine finally after the pandemic to to meet these people.

And you know, I don't, I don't think they even realized what I was experiencing because I couldn't possibly explain it to them, but I.

Got out of the car and they said, oh, come on over, sit by the campfire.

You know, you want to you want to wine, a beer, a tea, whatever, just playing some music and and and and I thought, Oh my God, these are my people.

This is what we do.

We sit around and talk.

So the dollhouse story.

So I met my new sisters and we're sitting around on the porch and I'm telling my story because the the sister who knew my parents, my niece had already warned me, don't say anything too bad about your parents because she won't be happy about it because she really loved them.

And I thought, well, okay, so anyway, so I was sitting there.

Talking to them.

And I was telling them exactly the story.

So I said, you know, my sisters used to tell me this story about the dollhouse and how they were all angry at me that Christmas because of the dollhouse.

The sister who knew my parents very well.

She said, well, wait a minute, that's that's not true.

And and I said what she said, well, well, that's not true.

He wouldn't have made you a doll house.

He didn't do that because our father was kind of this master Carpenter.

And I think my birth certificate father was always a little bit jealous.

So whenever he made anything, you know, everybody made a big deal about it.

There were pictures.

Somebody would have had it in the family.

And I realized again it was like being kicked in the summit, but this time in a more positive way.

She said he wouldn't have done that.

And I thought, Oh my word, I've been they made that up.

I've been lied to all these years.

It doesn't exist.

The dollhouse doesn't exist.

But I mean that's that's just like 1 pure example of everything that.

Yeah, my life was about it never exists.

So Speaking of your siblings and the way you're raised siblings and the way that they treated you, you know the dollhouse incident and and others, what is your relationship like with them now?

Non existent, we're done.

Even after this vindication.

Yeah, I don't know what they're thinking because they've shunned me for so long that, you know, that's that's what they do.

The the middle sister who I had some contact with was the one who agreed to do a DNA test as a as a control.

When our results came up on the ancestry there, it was for everybody to see and then we were texting back and forth and.

I said, well, you know, you grew up with a father who loved you, and I grew up with a man who wasn't capable of loving an innocent child and didn't even have the decency to tell me.

And she got angry.

She said, that's it.

I am not talking about this with you anymore.

We're done.

I mean, I have, I have the text to all of this.

So that was, that was back in 2018 when I found out.

So this last summer when I was first able to go back and and meet these people, my son who's now 17 or was 17 at the time, he emailed my that sister and said, well, he'd like to meet up because he remembered them from when he was 10 years old when we last saw them.

So she, she wrote, she actually wrote this back.

It was so, so mean spirited and hurtful and she's not actually that.

That kind of a person I'm I, I loved her.

I always loved her.

And I and I still love her.

But she wrote back.

She said, well, if you, if you mean that you want to visit, that's OK.

But nobody wants to see your mother because she's too angry and nobody wants to have anything to do, you know, Nobody wants anything to do with her.

Wow.

And and so this, of course, is used as a cudgel to prevent any further discussion.

Where would you say you are?

In your journey today.

It's really difficult to know in some ways still who I am and where I am because I feel like I I again, I have no framework for what is, what is normal or healthy to some extent because I I think I was told all my life that I came from a normal healthy family and clearly I didn't.

I feel more maybe trepidation and and fear that I still have to uncover.

The results or the It's hard to It's hard to talk about.

In some ways I I have to I I still have to address what a whole lifetime of this has done to my interpersonal relationships, or black thereof.

I've I've had in many ways a a a rich, interesting and exciting life.

Especially I think the childhood emotional abuse and neglect made it difficult for me to truly have healthy relationships.

So of course, one of the first things I did was to get my son into therapy thinking that, you know, if I've been damaged as a as a person, if I've been that damaged as a person, then I.

That have probably not been very good, Mother, but I don't think that's entirely true.

No, of course not.

Everybody tells me that and I've always had these really good friends.

It's I I've I've really been blessed by by the kindness of other people but but the but the thought that I may have somehow hurt him or or been unable to.

Raise him in a healthy way was was very painful for for me.

But as it turns out that that doesn't seem to be the case.

So you know this idea that the trauma is, it's not, it's not something that ever leaves you.

So I think you have to come to terms with it and sometimes you have to.

Wrestle it back in its place, but it's not going to leave you because it's it's the valid experience that you've had, and it it becomes a not maybe significant.

It shouldn't be significant, but it becomes an integral part of who you are, and that doesn't have to be a bad thing.

In fact, I think that there's a lot of wisdom to be gained from having been through.

Various experiences.

I think one of the things that upset me the most, though, is that I tried so hard all my life to figure out what it was, and if I figured it out earlier, it probably would not have done as much damage as it did.

I don't.

I don't know what to do with that family of origin.

There's there's no there's nothing I can do.

But and I I actually think I'm a fairly private person.

But I feel like there's something.

Maybe you can give me some insight.

There's something about this.

This the telling of the story, it's it's not just that it's cathartic.

It seems to be something primal about the telling of our stories and our significant in it.

I think it, you know, we spend so much of our lives being told something else that when we say it out loud and and the more times we say it out loud it makes it real, we are self validating.

What?

Maybe on some level we've always known to be true, but you know, we spent so long either believing the opposite or being told.

And you know, in your case, that something else is is the truth.

And to me at least, it feels really powerful to own what happened and define it as I define it, because nobody else can define it for me.

You hear so many stories in which people had this happen to them but they had otherwise loving families who it may not have been perfect but there but there was love.

There was a there was you know there was a wrestling out of all of these events together and and I had and this this birth certificate father I had was a preacher of love.

He preached all this stuff you know and.

And it was really confusing.

I mean, you couldn't criticize him.

He was, you know, this is what he did, right?

And yet that wasn't my experience at all.

And here I am.

I'm not, I'm not alone.

I have my friends.

I have my son.

But I I grew up in a family with five other siblings and two parents and and there's there's nothing left of that.

It it's gone.

I I'm not I I'm.

I'm not sure what to make of it.

I'm not sure how sorry I am about it, but I'm not sure.

Yeah, that's I think it's a never ending journey really.

What advice would you offer to a parent that is keeping a DNA surprise from their child?

I'm probably the wrong person to ask, because I'd have to be very circumspect in how I would say it.

But you better get out in front of this really quickly or you're going to be sorry.

You do not want to be keeping the secret.

What advice do you have for someone who just discovered that they have a DNA surprise or an N P/E?

To reach out to people you know you can trust and who and who you know love.

You take lots of walks in nature and take your time.

Go slowly.

Just just be in the moment and and experience everything you're feeling because you don't want to have to go back and sort that stuff out.

Just just let it come over you and just keep moving.

Keep walking, keep walking in the forest with your dogs, let it come.

The therapy thing is, is is a really interesting one because obviously, I mean it's a it's a go to thing.

I have no trouble with therapy, but I did so much therapy for so many years that I almost feel like coming out on the other end.

I've already done my time.

I mean I know that's not true, but I had a therapist here for a while, but because of language and culture it's it's, I don't think it's necessarily effective.

I was immediately diagnosed with complex PTSD.

Never occurred to me it's been more helpful to me to learn more myself about what it was.

But of course I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me if I didn't have the truth.

This was my whole life trying to figure this out and and to have it be this, I thought it was me.

I had nothing to do, you know?

All the time and and angst and resources I wasted trying to sort this out.

Because I thought there was something wrong with me.

It's never about me.

Honey, I thank you so much for coming on and bravely sharing your story.

You have been through so much in your life and I'm so happy that you finally were validated and were able to learn the truth.

And I just wish you the best as you continued to process and heal.

Thank you so much.

It means a lot to me.

And I thank you on behalf of everybody for bringing these stories to light.

It's important.

It's good work.

Thanks again to Penny for sharing her story.

If you have a DNA surprise story that you'd like to share, please e-mail dnasurprises@gmail.com