Laurie’s DNA Surprise

This transcript was generated automatically. Its accuracy may vary.

Speaker 1

The TNA surprise Journey can be shocking, upsetting and isolating, but you're not alone and there is hope connection and Community are powerful tools as we process.

And he'll DNA surprise Network and DNA surprises podcast are proud to host.

The first ever DNA, surprise Retreat May for through the 7th 2023 and Tucson Arizona.

Join Us for four days of healing, including expert-led sessions delicious meals and fun time together that will help us integrate our DNA surprises and Lead, happier more fulfilling lives.

If you've been looking for space to learn grow and heal, this is your sign.

Registration is open.

Learn more at DNA surprise retreat.com Sure I'm old enough and wise enough.

I'd like to.

I'd like to say to know that you can't force relationships and that you know, I I don't ever go where I feel I'm not fully welcomed.

And while I've not been rejected by the donors family, I've not been

Speaker 2

East necessarily, and I don't know, I'm listening to your stories about, you know, families where the family of origin, rejects them.

And then the family, the found family rejects them, and sometimes, you know, it's best to just leave, well, enough alone and to be grateful for the information that they have provided,

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 ourselves in July of 2021 I discovered that I am an NP 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 were shocked by a DNA Discovery.

Mostly through Modern DNA testing.

We're telling the stories of NP.

He's adoptees and donor conceived people, and their families.

This is DNA surprises.

DNA surprises often shake the very core of what we believe our identities to be in this week's episode.

Lori shares, how she went from believing she was the only child of to concentration, camp, survivors of the Holocaust to learning.

She is one of at least six siblings.

Half of whom were born as the result of assisted reproduction.

Lori always knew her parents went to a fertility doctor, but she had no idea that she was donor conceived.

She shares how she learned of her donor conception who she has connected with and how this has changed her perspective of her parents and identity.

In mostly positive ways.

Thank you for sharing your story Lori.

My name is Lori.

I am nearing my 70th birthday and I'm in Washington DC.

I was born to two concentration, camp survivors.

I'm a child of survivors of the Holocaust and I was a very wanted, very loved only child.

The the Holocaust was heavily a part of me, I think it couldn't not be my normal was not like anybody else is normal.

I thought all adults had numbers tattooed on their left for arms and that When I grew up, I would get my numbers as well.

Oh, wow.

I thought everybody's father, awoke in the middle of the night screaming and that.

I mean, that was.

That was my normal.

I didn't know if Grandparents were a thing or not.

I didn't know anybody who had any maybe they were just a thing on TV.

Hmm, so I guess my life was as normal as as could be under the circumstances until I was 12 years old and my mother died suddenly and unexpectedly.

Leaving me with a father who barely spoke English and who was a man of very few words to begin with and even fewer after we lost my mother.

So but I always knew that I was the most important thing in his world.

The sun rose and set by me and there was never any doubt.

In my mind that these were, my parents

did your parents talk to you about what happened, you know, during the Holocaust, did they share any of that?

Or was it just something that you knew of but wasn't spoken

about it was spoken about in in Yiddish.

English was not my first language.

My language in my home was Yiddish when my parents would get together with their friends, we children would Know that when the parents switch to polish that was the time that they expected that we would leave the room because polish was the language.

We didn't know.

Hmm.

So I picked up what I picked up just from living with it, and it was not a full story, by any means, and the story.

Pretty much shut down when my mother died.

So, there was not much talking after that about much of anything so fast forward.

Forward, many decades DNA testing became a thing.

I decided, you know, I'm going to take this ancestry test, maybe I'll find descendants of anybody else in the family who survived?

Maybe they changed their names, maybe they got new identities, but you know, through DNA.

Maybe I would find descendants of other family members.

Each of my parents was the only Survivor of What had been large families?

And I father side, they were distant cousins and my mother recalled, that she had an aunt who left Europe in the late 1800s, and who settled in New Jersey that Aunt unlearning that she only had one Survivor left of her entire European family.

Sponsored my parents to come to the u.s.

So, I had that One elderly, aunt and I had some distant cousins on my father's side, but really no family in my day-to-day life, maybe, I could find Family, some kind of family through ancestry.

The test came back and made no sense to me whatsoever.

I did find a descendant of my mother's aunt, who I knew was a second cousin as I was growing up, so I knew the test was partially accurate.

But who are all these other people and who is this very close relation, who I don't recognize at all.

So it turned out to be a woman who, you know, who I Googled and, you know, found a photo of and I saw a resemblance but I had no idea how we could possibly be related ancestry indicated, that it was either.

Either a grandparent grandchild relationship, but I could tell by This Woman's photo that we were contemporary.

So that wasn't it same thing with an aunt or a, or a nice and know.

I couldn't see that either in my early understanding of DNA which was very limited.

I did not think I had access to any of my father's lines because I didn't have it be male relatives on that side.

Who's haplogroup?

I could identify with.

So, I initially thought I was looking at only my mother's line and it made no sense to me.

If my mother had been pregnant.

If this had been a half-sibling, which was the other option.

If my mother had been pregnant, I certainly would have known it and she certainly never would have relinquished a child ever.

Right.

I always knew that my parents had been to a fertility specialist.

I was Was a very loved wanted child.

There was born, eight years after my parents married and I was the only one I used to Pine for an older brother.

Well, if you don't have one by the time you're born, you're not going to get one

right, friends.

So my mother would talk to me about her previous miscarriages.

And in my child's mind, I would Envision that that would have been my older brother or another would have been an older sister You had several miscarriages.

Okay.

All right.

So I figured that test was a fluke,

so you just thought it's a mistake, was the ethnic breakdown, what?

You

anticipated, 100% 100%.

I am 100% Ashkenazi Jewish from Eastern Europe and this made sense to me, this don't make sense to me.

Also, the woman A who was identified as a potential half-sibling was also 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, and I saw a physical resemblance, but I reached out to her, we exchanged, I don't know. 12 messages, maybe neither one of us.

Could figure this out.

We had nothing in common, except we kind of had a physical resemblance.

We were both born and raised in the same state and we We're both 100% Ashkenazi Jewish but nothing else made sense.

So we both figured F must be an error.

So you accepted that it was a fluke, you thought?

Hey, my ethnic breakdown is exactly what I

anticipated and I found the one second cousin descended descended from my mother's side and so I knew it wasn't an entire fluke.

Right?

About you mentioned that you knew your parents had seen a fertility doctor.

What happens

next?

So the pandemic takes, hold and Rural lockdown, and I just decided, you know, I've got the time now, I've got the bandwidth.

I'm going to take a different DNA test.

So I took a 23andMe test, the results arrived on December twenty, first, twenty Twenty-One, it indicated that I had a half sister completely different than the first individual from the History test.

This was a completely different individual and this was identified specifically as a half sister.

She contacted me immediately and wrote.

You must be as surprised as I was to learn that.

We're tap sisters and then she went on to explain that.

She also thinks it's probably an error in the test unless and then she went on to tell me that she had tried to get her father to take a DNA test for Years and he kept refusing and she couldn't understand why he's a doctor is a medical professional.

He knows what this is, what is there to be afraid of and then he finally acknowledged to her that.

Well, back in 1952, he had donated sperm three times.

It was before he met her mother and as soon as he met her mother, he stopped donating and gave it not a second thought.

And now that he knows that DNA testing is a thing now, Does not want to know what came of

it.

Oh

wow.

Then she tells me her father is still alive now.

I'm almost 70 years old, my mother died.

When I was 12, my father died.

When I was 26 to learn that.

I have a parent still alive and about to turn. 100 years old was mind-boggling.

What was your reaction?

I mean, Aside from what I can only imagine is shocked to learn that the fertility doctor, that your parents went to had used.

Do you think that your parents

knew?

That's the question.

I've been mulling over since December 21st.

I don't see how they could possibly know Dani Shapiro's book Inheritance, which I'm sure you've come across pretty much describes what my parents underwent, which was the fertility Specialist would mix the husband's sperm with the donor sperm.

So that there could be plausible paternity on the part of the husband and plausible deniability on the part of the donor.

There was no way back then to know which little swimmer made it up to the egg.

There was no way to know my parents had they conceived me and I was born and I'm healthy.

And my father had a cousin.

Also experiencing Leti issues, and he sent his cousin and wife to the same fertility.

Specialist I was 5 years old, I remember, they would come to our home, which was closer to the fatigue fertility, doctors home.

They would go into my parents bedroom, they closed the door and a while later.

They would rush out because they had to get to an appointment right away.

And even as a five-year-old, I knew that this was not an ordinary social visit.

They were They would visit us socially and stay for coffee and but no, these daytime visits were very odd and they turned out not to have been successful conceiving that way, but they did adopt.

But Danny Shapiro's book describes that exact process where the donor would be in like the next room and the couple would have had relations.

Italy before running to the doctor and then the doctor would insert the donors donation.

And there was no way of knowing who the father actually was until– fast forward, many decades and we are so it made all the sense in the world to me.

As soon as she said that, her father had donated, sperm

was she receptive to you?

Was she opened, you know, considering this was her raised father.

Yes.

But she happy to learn about

a sibling.

She explained that she, and her two brothers were very curious about me.

And then she offered medical information, which was very helpful.

And so, we corresponded a couple times, we zoomed, we spoke on the phone once we zoomed once.

And now having exchanged enough information, it seems to the Action seems to have dropped off, and I have to respect that.

The brothers are very protective of their father.

Their father is extraordinarily embarrassed that any of this came to light because nobody can think of sperm donation without thinking of the action that led to

What I learned was that my sperm donor.

I don't know what to call them.

That's what I've been.

That's what he is in my mind was looking to fund it.

Equipment for his new medical office.

He was a newly minted physician himself.

He was not certainly not the fertility doctor that I know for sure he had two completely different specialty but he did it for money.

I would have liked to have thought there was something altruistic.

Yeah.

In in his helping this struggling, couple of Holocaust Survivors to produce a child but no he did it for the money

how Does that make you

feel?

I think I'm neutral about that.

I mean, I'm extraordinarily grateful to him for my life.

And I have no choice but to respect his wish to not go there.

Does he know about

you?

He does.

I asked my half-sister to convey to him my gratitude and she did and apparently at 100 years old, he's he's healthy but cranky and his response, you know?

To her saying that I was grateful, you know his response was for what so he's still very testy about anybody knowing his part of this

so you haven't spoken to him directly.

I have not and I will not, I will honor the wishes of the brothers to protect their father from, you know, any embarrassment or discomfort or anything.

I'm Excursion early grateful to know that he's still alive.

I had always thought that because my parents died young that I was just destined to die young as well.

Now, to find out that I have a parent who's a hundred years old and that oh my God, I might live longer is an incredible Revelation, and what a

gift?

Yeah, what a gift.

In fact, when I told my son's about this, one of their react, one of them reacted by saying, well, we've just got a huge.

We've just gotten a huge upgrade in longevity.

That's true.

And my other son.

He was sensitive to what?

He felt was an invasion of privacy of the parents

involved.

And

so just having those two reactions enabled me to balance my own reaction.

Yes, this was good news in terms of longevity but be very respectful of not.

Not in Inserting myself into a family that thought it was complete.

That knew it was complete.

I will be grateful just for the knowledge that I've received.

Yeah, that's a that's a really interesting perspective.

Did they learn of so I know that you matched on Ancestry with another sibling but did they know of other siblings?

They did not until I told them that I think I have found the other two families.

One who I thought had a physical resemblance to me and there was another half sister who I've learned died in 2008.

How do I know her son pops up on Ancestry as my half?

Nephew mmm.

So I Googled her and yeah, she was from the same area and about the same age and her son is my half nephew because they were on Ancestry.

Re and my half-sister who was raised by the sperm, donor was on 23andMe.

And I was the only one on both platforms.

I'm the only one with the knowledge of who everybody is.

I have not yet, told the ancestry families.

What I've learned because I'm not certain if it's my story alone to tell hmm.

In other words, in other words, if I received out of the wild blue, a a mess, From somebody, giving me the information that I would have given this other family, I would have insisted on like, well how do you know this?

And I would have wanted to contact the family of the donor.

So I told my 23andMe half-sister about the others and I asked her, what this is her story as well as mine.

What do we do about these other families who don't know?

And that's when she ran it by the brothers.

And they That they felt that well, they've determined that.

I am neither an Ax Murderer nor do I want anything from them and so, I'm safe, but who knows about these other two families, maybe they shouldn't press their look.

So they did not express much interest in knowing who the other families were.

And so here I am sitting with this information.

Not knowing, do I tell them or not?

You may know the answer to that.

Hence, my, hence, my obsession with listening to your podcast.

So you mentioned that you exchanged a couple of messages with your half-sister that you matched with on Ancestry.

Now that you know this reality, have you contacted her to just build any more of a relationship or are you completely leaving it until you decide what you're going to

do?

I'm leaving it.

I don't trust myself not to blurt out what I know.

So let me not put myself in a position where I have to very awfully curate, what I say.

So, so now I've not reached out, I see her on Facebook, we're not Facebook friends, I just see her public profile.

I don't know that she has the level of curiosity that I

had mmm,

and I don't know what I would say to her.

Maybe suggest she take the 23andMe test and then see what it says for her, but I pretty much have pieced together, our Collective story

Have you considered that?

You might have some other siblings out

there.

I've considered, although I have no reason to doubt what the donor said about having donated three times.

So, he raised three children with his wife, and then I am one of his three donations.

The ancestry woman who I think, looks like me as another one.

And the deceased one, whose son comes up as my Have nephew is the third one.

So that's the product of his three donation.

So I have no reason to doubt that he stopped donating when he met their mother and the timing of all of this works out except that I think I don't have any older siblings, the children, he raised or all younger than me.

And I honestly

don't know about the the other two families from ancestry.

They're basically my contemporaries.

How has this surprise Affected your view of your parents positively or

negatively.

Oh, completely positively.

It just makes me love my parents even more because they went to the ends of the Earth to bring me forth.

Yeah, and I, honestly don't know if my father ever even considered, I mean, both of my parents, what they endured during the Holocaust and then to come and find out that they were Fertility Challenge and then to forge ahead and and find a solution to that my admiration for them is just knows no end and my love for them just knows no end.

I hope I hope I provided them with the joy that they sought more than Joy with the continuation of their their lines.

I had always I felt that I was the weakest link in what had been very strong chains in that, you know, my parents each came from large families.

The families were murdered my parents survived and produced only me, and I was that weakest link in what had been generations and generations and generations of people before me, a now, there was a big burden, kind of on my My shoulders to carry forth and now to find out that, you know, rather than being a product of Trauma from both sides of my family.

It's like, my trauma has been reduced by half my inherited.

My inherited trauma because the sperm donors side fled Europe in the 1880s and built a huge life in Quran.

In fact, it's now a very large family and boy was I surprised to find that I had not just this one second cousin on my mother's side, but I have five thousand and six second cousins on the sperm.

Donor side

is a huge family,

most of them are in the u.s. some are still in Europe, which kind of surprised me.

So we would these 5006 second cousin.

Instead, I just learned, I have some of them.

Started contacting me saying hi.

I see you popped up as a second cousin.

Let's explore how we're related.

Well, I know exactly how were related and I can't tell you.

So that's been a little awkward.

So I reached out to the half-sister who was raised by the sperm donor and I said well, your family is starting to contact me now.

I want to be respectful.

What would you suggest and she responded that, you know, Don't have to answer.

And so I have not answered any of the outreaches.

But I think that after the sperm donor passes, I think I'm going to revisit my approach to all of this.

I'm going to respect, while he's alive, his wish, to not go there mmm-hmm, but I think after he passes all bets are off.

It's my story to tell, yes.

And it's their story as well.

Well that they don't need to be ashamed of.

So in the meantime, are you doing anything to feel connected to your genetic?

Father's Side?

Whether does learning more about their family history or yes.

So my half-sister who was raised by the sperm donor and I have exchanged photographs and family photos, I don't see much of a resemblance between me and her.

Or me and him or, you know, I don't see a physical resemblance, the way I didnít particularly with the ancestry half-sister, but oh my god, when I see a picture of the sperm donor, when he was younger and I put it next to a picture of my son's, oh my God.

Yes, yes, I see it then in fact she remarked that my son's look more like her father than any of his own eight grandchildren.

Wow so they gathered for his hundredth birthday man.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that and again I you know not possible.

I'm going to respect their wishes but I would have loved to have seen how they all interact with each other.

Also taught me.

Something about families are not The Sara Lee just genetic their family has.

Has adopted children has raised children that they have not given birth to or fathered.

So this has opened my eyes to the fact that family is who you love.

And yeah, I have a wealth of family members, none of whom I'm related to all of whom I love and that's a pretty good thing to have.

Amassed along the way that DNA interesting It is, doesn't necessarily make family and isn't necessary for families to flourish and they taught me that just by sharing with me, there are many family members who to whom they're not necessarily connected by DNA.

It's a nice thing to know.

Yeah, that's a really beautiful perspective and the obligation I

had felt along the way to, you know, it's solely on my shoulders to perpetuate the entire Jewish people.

Because I'm the weakest

link.

Yeah,

that went away.

I mean, that was there was a burden

lifted who else in your raised family or immediate life, your day-to-day life knows about this.

Oh gosh everybody strangers on the street.

I mean, as you will know, talking it through is very helpful toward processing it.

My father had I had a just a handful of not even a handful of distant cousins who had survived the Holocaust among survivors, because there were so little family left.

These distant cousins became as if they were a and uncles.

So so I, you know, I had a family that I thought I was related to and it didn't matter how distant the relation was.

But now to learn that I'm not related to To them by Blood at all.

I had always thought of myself as the small American remnant of what it is.

Now, a large is really family and they helped raise me too after my mother died.

I was sent there back and forth for Summers and they were very much the closest things I had to the older brothers that I pined for.

And now to find out that there's no genetic connection was a little bit jarring.

They have since a short me that, of course, we're still cousins.

How do you feel about

that a little detached?

I'm still processing that.

Yeah, the initial shock of learning this is like a punch in the gut and I was indeed I wouldn't say a basket case, I was useless to anybody and everybody for at least I would say the next four weeks I could think about Thing.

But this and now it's just you know, I've integrated enough of it so that yes, I've returned to being fully functional.

I still talk about this probably too much, but it's all part of the process.

It's also a fascinating story, but I didn't share the grief and Trauma that you and others have experienced.

Mine was not necessarily.

It wasn't a lost per se.

It was Sort of a gain that was just outside of my reach.

And my story's not over yet.

So,

when you say that you talk about it too much, what do you mean by

that?

I've asked myself, recently of all, the people, I've told this story to if this story, it happened to any of them would they have told me.

So and also some of the reactions I've gotten have been well you know I wouldn't be out there telling my story.

Okay, you're not

me?

interesting.

And also I'm I'm a lover of a good story to tell and to here, and this is a good story.

It is a good story

on that.

On that note your story has changed.

So you went from believing that you were the only child of two Holocaust.

Survivors to being still a child of a concentration camp.

Survivor but also a fresh out of med school physician who I imagine has gone on to do well for himself.

Quite and was yes, still is still up and kicking and was practicing medicine and you know, into his 90s.

How has that change in your identity affected

I will give you an example.

As I was growing up our family doctor was A German Jew who had escaped Nazi Germany before the Holocaust.

He adored my parents and did everything he could to help them in this journey.

And I'm sure that he's the one that referred them to the fertility specialist, he had a daughter about my age and we became just best friends since and schoolmates and just in and out of each, other's houses all the time and her mother would call Mother after every report card and one marking period I did better than she did.

I remember unlearning this, the doctor's wife, the mother of my childhood friend said to my mother?

Well, my daughter will overtake her next marking period.

After all she's the child of a doctor and you people, you know, never even graduated high school.

Wow, my mother was spoiled Was incensed at that fast forward.

I am the child of a medical professional.

And I don't know what that says about Intelligence being passed on.

I've always been proud of the Survivor genes that I've had and in order to survive, you have to have some degree of Street.

Smarts, I always found that, maybe that's what I've inherited, but no.

Now it has equalized me in my mind to anybody any off.

Spring of any buddy has the potential whether they know it or not to achieve and I mean how elitist can you

get?

Saying you know your parents are poor immigrants so of course you're not going to do as well in school.

Wow I will hold my professional accomplishments up against anybody's any day in a way.

I wonder if the half-sister who contacted me immediately.

I wonder what.

What she would have done had she listened to the advice of some of your interviewees about, you know, just sit with it for a while and just see how it feels before you reach it.

Mmm-hmm,

I'm glad she reached out.

I'm glad she didn't have second thoughts about that or maybe she had subsequent second thoughts.

But I've gotten quite a gift from her, which is the knowledge that she's

provided.

which I didn't even know where

I was missing.

Spits.

And I'm very interested in this because your parents, you knew that they went to a fertility doctor

always.

Yep.

So they were open about that.

So what advice would you offer a parent who might be keeping a DNA surprise from their

child?

The same advice.

That others, your podcast have offered, which is tell the truth, it can be handled.

I'm just uncertain if my parents ever knew.

The truth.

I mean, did they just go and receive some magic hocus-pocus treatment that they didn't realize contain donor sperm?

I don't know it back then.

It was done anonymously.

No records were kept cash.

Payments were made right.

This never would have come to light without commercially available, DNA tests.

Now that those are a thing, I can't imagine any parent, not During the information with their child.

Has their child, you know, matures enough to handle it.

There should be moving forward.

Not to put you out of business, but there should not be DNA surprises in the

future.

Oh, I agree.

I agree.

100% And Glory.

I would love to be put out of business.

Yeah, no secrets.

There should be no secrets as the child is able to handle

And and what advice would you offer someone who's in your Position and has just learned that there in

npe go to the edge of what, you know, and sit there for a while.

Let it let it percolate how you feel when you first learn about.

This does not need to guide.

How you act, how you perceive should be done with a little bit more deliberation than maybe.

You have initially, how many Secrets get blurted out with no forethought?

I'm not sure.

That's the best way.

But, you know, take take the time, you need to digest.

What it is?

You learned?

Even if you have to put it on the back shelf and pull it out, three years later when you take a different test.

Yeah, also also, it's okay to take multiple

tests.

Mmm.

I mean, I think I would if, and when I ever contact the families I learned about on the ancestry site, Right.

I think I will absolutely encourage them to go to a different platform, 23andMe, or whatever is out there and see what you uncover there.

Because the only thing you're going to uncover is information that other people have provided with their DNA.

If they're different platforms, then you know, Secrets, remain secrets for even longer, I understand there's an ability to aggregate DNA information among sites but I've not Florida.

Any of that?

I think I have enough information.

Now, I don't think I need to go exploring anymore.

Well, Lori thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing your story.

No, it's relatively new for you.

So I hope that it continues to move in a positive direction.

And that eventually, you are able to have more of a connection with your genetic family, if that's what you want whenever you decide.

Thank you.

And thank you for the good work.

Work that you do. thanks again to Lori for sharing her story, if you have a DNA surprised that you'd like to share, please email, DNA surprises at gmail.com until next time,