Stephanie’s DNA Surprise

This transcript was generated automatically. Its accuracy may vary.

The Puzzle of Identity and DNA Surprises

From my experience, because of all that othering that I just could not understand when I was white, I just could not understand it it it made sense to me when I found out the truth, but I was still able to block so much of the truth.

Like I look like my father, I look like my Cuban family.

And I was able to convince myself of otherwise.

So there are people who will have an ethnicity shift who won’t see it coming.

Like I had got all this othering.

And so it kind of gave me a hint that when it happened it made sense.

But if I had not seen this coming at all, I can’t even imagine.

It’s like, I don’t know, like you put together a 5000 piece puzzle and you’re just done and somebody comes along and knocks it off the table and you got to start all over again.

Speaker 2

Welcome to DNA Surprises, a podcast that explores the life altering world of unexpected DNA discoveries.

I’m your host, Alexis Ourselt.

This show centers the stories of people who’ve experienced NP, ES or non paternal events.

In other words, people who’ve learned that their biological father isn’t who they thought he was.

We’ll also hear from adoptees, donor conceived people, and the families navigating these discoveries.

Get ready to follow the incredible journeys that begin with a simple DNA test.

This is DNA surprises.

Growing Up Ethnically Ambiguous in Detroit

What are you?

For those of us who are, quote, ethnically ambiguous, this question is 1.

We hear over and over again when meeting new people.

When I was a child, tired of being questioned, I started to snap back.

I’m human.

As you can imagine, that went over pretty well.

In this week’s episode, I’m joined by Stephanie, who fielded questions about her ethnic background her entire childhood.

She spent much of her early life trying to connect with others to fit in somewhere.

It wasn’t until much later that ADNA test revealed the truth.

Stephanie reached out to me because she wanted to explore her feelings around her ethnic shift with someone who had been there.

We discussed some complicated feelings around feeling the need to earn our identity.

She also shares how she’s connecting to her roots and why having the information makes the what are you question a little easier to navigate.

Thank you for sharing your story, Stephanie.

Speaker 1

My name is Stephanie, I’m 51 years old and I’m from Detroit, MI.

I was born of the third child to a white southern couple who had moved N to Detroit when they were teenagers ’cause my grandparents were looking for jobs in the auto industry.

They landed in the vibrant community of southwest Detroit, multicultural people from all over.

So I grew up in southwest Detroit.

There was an area of southwest Detroit called Mexican Town, so there were a lot of Hispanic people there, but there were also Maltese people, Greek people, Polish people, Ukrainian people.

Everywhere I went, I heard another language every day.

And unlike today, nobody seemed to mind, right?

It was just the beautiful place that I grew up in.

Childhood Trauma and a Shift to the Suburbs

My father was, he was an abusive alcoholic.

Just say it because of that.

My mother divorced him when I was about two.

She left him, fled in the middle of the night, you know, when I was about two and she married a, a man from the neighborhood.

Her second husband, my stepfather, I call him dad.

He was my dad because, you know, she married him when I was little and he was the first father I remember.

So they got together right away when I was like 3, maybe even 2 1/2.

And so he was my dad and I knew he wasn’t my real dad.

That’s what I called the other one, my real dad.

But he was my dad.

Pretty normal childhood, you know, Southwest Detroit was a great place to live.

This was in the 70s, right?

So I don’t know.

It was just, it was a great place to grow up.

I had three more siblings come along and things were going pretty well.

And at some point my mother decided it was time to find another husband.

I don’t know, I guess she thought she was trading up or whatever, and she sent me to go live with my real dad.

And my real dad lived in the suburbs.

And Detroit is the area that I grew up in, very multicultural and diverse.

But Detroit has historically been and still is to this day, metro Detroit, very segregated.

And so the city has always been vast majority black city, but this, you step outside of the city into the suburbs and it changes immediately.

It’s very, very homogeneous, white in most of the suburbs outside of Detroit.

So I went to go live with my real dad and he lived in the suburbs.

So I was 11 at this time.

I’d had a pretty normal childhood up to that point.

Everything was good.

I was chubby in an area where most people were skinny, in an era where most people were skinny.

I was one of the few chubbier kids, but other than that I was pretty happy about myself.

I didn’t really think about myself or how I looked or anything like that for the 1st 10 or 11 years of my life.

Navigating ‘What Are You?’ in a Homogeneous School

So I move out to the suburbs and my real dad enrolls me in the school and I’m like surrounded by white people.

And I had never been in this type of environment.

And the school probably had about 1500 students.

It was a middle school, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, and I probably could not have counted like 10 people of any identifying heritage of any sort.

It was just homogeneous white.

Now I’m the kid of two white southerners.

I should fit right into this environment, but for some reason I didn’t.

I mean, I, it wasn’t me.

I didn’t feel like I didn’t belong.

I did in a sense, ’cause, you know, we Detroiters are different from suburbanites.

You know, it’s just a whole different kind of lifestyle, different attitude.

Speaker 3

Was the whiteness the thing that made you feel different or was it more of like the the suburb culture that you attributed it to?

Well, I will say the suburban culture, first of all, was better off financially than generally the folks in Detroit, More working class in Detroit, more middle class in the suburbs.

So there was more money and they wore better clothes than I did or whatever.

But back home in Detroit, I never felt like my clothes weren’t cool enough or anything like that.

But the big queue was how everybody treated me, and I picked up nicknames really early, and I didn’t quite understand them.

And the first one was Stefro, which is Stephanie plus Afro.

They called me Stefro.

I mean, my hair is dark and it’s curly and all of that, but it was just my hair.

I didn’t really, you know, think of anything about it.

The next one was Taco.

Kids started calling me Taco.

I would be walking down the hall and kids that I didn’t even know would be like, hey, what’s up Taco?

What’s up, Taco?

And I would be like, I’m not Mexican.

I’m not Mexican.

I appreciate the beauty of Mexican culture and I love Mexican food, but I’m not Mexican, you know, and I’d be like, I’m not Mexican.

Why are you calling me Taco?

You know, I’m eleven, right?

I’m 11-12 years old.

And so like those were just, it was just, I didn’t fit in.

I, it was just a bunch of othering that I wasn’t familiar with, like I should have fit in.

I should have.

These were my people.

All of a sudden I’m an outsider and I, and I didn’t know why I was an outsider.

Escaping Abuse and Finding Acceptance in Detroit

I wound up hanging out with the misfits.

God bless the misfits for always being welcoming.

So I’m, I’m there for a while and, and, and my real dad is, is still an alcoholic and he’s still violent.

And my mother and I, we have a fraught relationship on and off because of this.

Like she left him because he was an abusive alcoholic, but it was cool to send me back to live with him when she wanted to run off with another man who apparently didn’t like children.

So she didn’t want to take all of us.

So she pawned as many of us off as she could where she could.

And even though it was this abusive, violent alcoholic, and so in addition to like being Taco at the school, I’m going home to this mean alcoholic who is super critical and, and, and abusive.

And so my mom eventually, I don’t know what happened.

Things didn’t work out with her new man.

She came back to my dad.

So she was living back with my dad and I thought she would bring me home, you know, since her and dad were back together.

And I was like, can you please Get Me Out of here?

Mom, can you please Get Me Out of here?

I hate it.

Your dad’s terrible, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And no, no, she wouldn’t was the answer.

And it was.

I was there for two years and then he actually, he started hitting me.

My real dad was hitting me in front of my friend who lived across the street.

She freaked out, ran home screaming and crying.

Her mother came over and was like, give me Stephanie out here right now.

She’s going to call the police.

Long story short, I get sent back to live with my mom and my dad in Detroit because the police got involved.

It wasn’t because I was being beaten or she felt bad or she wanted to bring me back.

It wasn’t until the police got involved in the situation, my abuse, which back then you could hit your children like it wasn’t even like it is now.

But I think my real dad got upset that the police got called and he was like, get her out of here.

Go, go live back.

Go back and live with your mom.

So I went back to Detroit and I was living with mom and dad and all my brothers and sisters again.

And I started going to high school there.

And the high school that I went to was multicultural just like everything else.

But for whatever reason, I started hanging around with the Mexican kids, which I don’t know, it just happened.

And there were Polish kids and Ukrainian kids and just regular white kids like me, and they were black kids.

It was just everybody.

But for some reason, I fell in with Mexican kids.

And at that point I realized that people thought I was Mexican, not just in the suburbs.

And they would, people would speak Spanish to me like I expecting I would know what they meant.

And that happened to me a lot now growing up.

I had learned a few little Spanish words here and there, just like I learned a few little Polish words here and there, you know, But in high school, I started studying Spanish.

You know, they offered Polish too, and German and whatever.

But I, I started studying Spanish and the Mexican kids kind of became my clique.

And I, I don’t know, I never told anybody I was Mexican.

You know, I never told anybody I was Mexican, but they believed I was Mexican.

Yeah.

How did you feel about that?

Like once you made that realization, did you like fitting in with the Mexican kids?

Was it just what it was?

Well, I think after feeling like I didn’t fit in for two years in the middle school, I was happy that I fit in somewhere.

I was happy that I was accepted and that I fit in.

But one of the things that happened in middle school all the time, that has happened throughout my entire life, but that was when people started asking me what are you?

That was another clue that I didn’t fit in ’cause they were certain that I was not one of them, ’cause that’s what what are you means?

What are you means?

You are clearly not one of us.

And I demand that you tell me what you are.

Mm Hmm.

And so I got that living in the suburbs that what are you constantly and the stefro and the Taco and the what are you?

And when I came back to Detroit and I hung around with the Mexican kids and the white kids thought I was Mexican, they stop asking me what are you?

People stop asking me what are you?

And then I could just be Stephanie again, which is who I had been up until I was 10 years old.

I was just Stephanie.

And so I never told anybody I was Mexican.

And a lot of Mexican people, they thought I was Puerto Rican.

They didn’t think I was Mexican.

They thought I was Puerto Rican.

But again, they didn’t.

They weren’t asking me what are you all the time either.

But I learned to speak Spanish.

Yeah, I fell in love with Spanish.

Finding Identity Through Mexican Culture and Family Support

And so I started studying it in 9th grade and 10th grade and I majored in it in college.

And I had just been, I’ve just been a, a Spanish speaker since I was about 14 or 15 years old.

It helped me.

It helped me fit in.

Although I would, if people did say, well, where are you from?

And I would say, oh, I’m, I’m American, you know, anybody was speaking Spanish too.

And they would say, oh, my God, you speak Spanish so well.

And I would be like, oh, thank you.

It’s such a beautiful language, you know, So if anybody ever asked me, I wouldn’t say I was something that I wasn’t.

But boy, it was so nice being in high school and having that clique of belonging and not being interrogated all the time.

Interesting.

Did you like take an interest in in foods and music and all of that or was it mostly the language and and people?

I’m curious how much you sort of assimilated with the group that you found, you know, comfort in and belonging.

Well, I mean, who doesn’t love Mexican food?

Like who doesn’t love Mexican food?

I lived in Southwest Detroit, in Mexican town, right outside of Mexican town, all of these fantastic restaurants, Sochimico, El Socalo, Los Galanes, like all of these incredible, fantastic Mexican restaurants.

And so I did appreciate the food.

But you know, my friend Lupe’s mom taught me how to make guacamole.

And so like, also, I don’t know, I learned how to cook and I had to speak Spanish when I hung out with my Mexican friends ’cause their parents generally didn’t speak English.

So it was almost like I got lessons on the daily, but they taught me food as well.

And I used to feel like I was culturally Mexican.

Coming out of Southwest Detroit made me culturally Mexican.

That’s what I would tell people when my, my daughter made her first communion, my I, I went to Mexican town, southwest Detroit to get her dress for communion.

And it has Our Lady of Guadalupe embroidered on the front of it, right?

Because that was that was my culture.

She even has a necklace with Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe.

You know, Our Lady of Guadalupe, like the Mexican emblem, like it just being raised in that culture and around those people.

And that’s what my friends did with their kids and that’s what their dresses look like.

And of course, they wore this gold necklace with Our Lady of Guadalupe on it when they got baptized, when they made their first communion.

Like that was just, that was what I did because that was the the group I was in.

Just to make the Long story short, my mother did send me back again, even though the police had gotten involved.

She left again and she sent me back again to live with my real dad in the suburbs, who again was abusive.

I was there for a year and a half.

Again, the police got involved.

Protective Services actually came out this time, and I was saved by my dad, my mom’s second husband, ’cause my mom wouldn’t take me back this time.

She had ran off again and she had divorced my dad and he took me in and let me finish high school.

Questioning Cherokee Roots and Early Genealogy Attempts

And, you know, when I started going to college and just gave me that loving, supportive environment that I needed.

And then at some point I asked my mom, ’cause people just every time I met somebody new, they would be like, what are you?

And I would just be like, I’m just white like you, you know, I’m like, I, I’m just, I, I’m, I’m not anything.

Are you Greek?

Are you Italian?

Are you Lebanese?

Like, and I asked my mom and she said, well, Steph, you know, I think my mama’s people were Indian, you know, Native American.

My mom said, I think my mama’s Mama, she was 100% Indian.

And so I was like, oh cool.

Well that maybe explains why people always think I’m something.

Maybe why I got dark hair, maybe why I got dark eyes, whatever.

Maybe my eyebrows were kind of big and bushy.

And I was like, maybe that explains.

OK, so I start telling people now I got an answer.

People are like, what are you?

And I’m like, well, I’m Native American.

And then they’ll be like, well, what tribe?

Because people they got to know this.

They have to know.

I like, it’s like literally I say hello, my name is Stephanie.

Your name is this.

Nice to meet you.

By the way, what are you?

It’s like I can’t even we can’t even have a conversation without you asking me what I am like.

So I would say, OK, well, I’m Native American.

And then they would be like, well, what tribe, you know.

And so then I go back to my mom and I’m like, OK, mom, what tribe?

And she was like, well, I think we’re Cherokee.

OK, cool.

Now I got a tribe now I’m Cherokee.

And then they want to know how much like am I getting free college?

You know, like I, I wish I was joking.

It’s wild the amount of entitlement that people feel like they have to know your ethnic background.

What?

Especially when it’s unclear, right?

It quote UN quote ambiguous.

Wow.

Yes.

So my mom starts taking me to pow wows.

So we’re going to pow wows.

I go to college and there’s a Native American Student association and I go to their events and I don’t feel Native American, even though that’s what my mom says we are.

I don’t feel comfortable enough to claim myself as Native American.

So I go to the events, I learn about, quote UN quote, my culture as they do these presentations, as they do these dances, and I go to these pow wows and I really enjoy the food.

I enjoy the people.

But I know this is not my experience.

This is not my reality.

And I’m not going to put myself out there as if I have lived my life as an indigenous person because I was raised white, because I’m white, you know, in that sense.

So I, I just didn’t feel like even if I had native ancestry, it wasn’t my reality, it wasn’t my culture, and I wasn’t going to insert myself into that.

But it, it stopped a lot of the questioning.

It gave an answer that I didn’t have before.

And so then I start deciding I want to look into our native family.

I want to kind of validate this already, you know, And so I start digging into the ancestry stuff.

And this is the 90s.

There’s no, there’s no ancestry.com, there’s no online stuff.

So I’m at Latter Day Saints centers and I’m downtown at the Detroit Public Library looking through census indexes and census.

And I’m trying, I’m looking into the Dawes Rolls because that’s where Native Americans are supposed to be listed.

And I’m trying to build our family tree.

I’m not finding anything.

Dead end, left and right, can’t find anything.

Unveiling Global Ancestry and Family Secrets

So I give up and I go on with my life because I had, you know, the abusive alcoholic father.

I kind of found myself in relationships with abusive men straight out, you know, my first relationships, that kind of violence and that what’s the word I’m looking for, Uncertainty of life being thrown back and forth.

It just leaves a mark and it kind of messes up your programming.

So I spent a few years in and out of abusive relationships and went to college and dropped out and went back and dropped out and then finally I got my head on straight and I met a great man and life was really going well.

In my 20s, my 30s, everything is solid.

We have a couple of daughters and then Family Tree DNA comes out with their DNA tests.

So it’s like 2008, 2009, and I call my mom and I’m like, mom, they got DNA test now.

Like I can figure out what kind of Indian we are, Native American.

Excuse me, That’s what my mom would say.

And I’m like, well, we should, you know, who are we going to test?

And you know, I’m not going to test my mom ’cause she would have more Native blood than I would, right?

Her mother had passed away, but she had a sister who was still alive.

So we decide that the best person to test is my grandma’s sister, who’s still alive but lives down in Georgia.

So my mother and I jump in a car and we drive down to Dalton, GA.

Now, this is far from Detroit, first of all.

And second of all, the test was expensive when they first came out, you know, and I’ve got a couple of young daughters and I’m got my own family.

But I buy this test and we go down to Georgia and we test my great aunt.

And, you know, a few weeks later when the test results come back and she’s not, she’s not native at all.

She’s like 97 or 98% English Irish, Scottish and like 2% sub-saharan African.

So I call my mom and I’m like mom, she doesn’t have any native blood at all.

Like she’s not native at all.

And my mom says, well, Steph, you know, I didn’t want to tell you this, but when my grandpa died and we were down South for the funeral, Mama and her brothers and sisters, you know, they got into an argument and my aunt said something to him.

And they were like, he ain’t even your daddy.

You ain’t got nothing to say.

He ain’t even your daddy.

So I didn’t want to tell you that.

But, you know, there were some rumors in the family that she was adopted.

Oh my gosh.

I’m not having the obvious question which I should have had, which was why you let me drive all the way down to Georgia if you thought she was not good.

And the first thing that occurred to me is what kind of horrible people want to tell somebody at their father’s funeral that he wasn’t their father?

You know, what kind of awful people are these people?

And I’m thinking, my poor aunt, how awful.

I didn’t think that.

Why did you let me drive all the why did I pay almost $300.00 for this test and we drive all the way down to Georgia.

That didn’t occur to me.

I don’t know why I put it on the back burner again.

Just went on with my life.

Things are good, work is good.

I finished college, got an advanced degree.

I got a really good job at a somewhat prestigious university.

Things are good.

And then my husband buys me ADNA test for my 40th birthday.

He gives it to me and I’m like, oh, cool, we’re, we can test my mom now.

Like, ’cause then, you know, we can like figure it out, ’cause maybe my aunt was adopted, right?

So we can test my mom now.

And my husband says, no, I got this for you.

OK, So I, I took the test.

I sent it off and, you know, waited for my results.

We used to have the computer in the living room.

This is what, 2014, 2015, We had a computer in the living room.

So when the kids were on it, we could see what they were doing, you know, And so I’m, we’re sitting on the couch watching TV, my husband and I and our daughters and, and then I got up to check my e-mail and I see I got the results.

So I log in and I’m waiting for it to load, you know, and the first thing I click on is the ethnicity estimate, right?

I want to see it.

And it’s loading slow, you know, ’cause it’s 2014, right?

It’s not loading quickly.

The page is loading slowly.

And I’m like, Oh my God, Oh my God.

I look away to watch the TV with my family.

I turned back to the computer screen and the whole globe is lit up.

The whole globe is colored.

You know, it looks like your little areas are colored where you’re from.

And the whole globe is colored in like everything like Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Northern Africa, Italy, Spain.

Of course, it had England, Ireland and Scotland.

The Americas were lit up showing native ancestry and I, I’m like what the fuck what the fuck?

It was all I could say like 7 or 8 times.

So by now my husband and my daughters are looking over my shoulder, you know, facing backwards on the couch.

And my husband starts cracking up and I’m like how the hell am I 12% sub-saharan African?

How the hell am I 5% N African?

How the hell am IA Middle Eastern?

How the hell am I Spanish?

How the hell am I native?

What the fuck.

I call my mom because my mom and I were close even though we had bad periods.

Like I didn’t talk to her for years after she sent me back that second time.

You know we had had a rough relationship but we were still close somehow.

And I called my mom and I was like, mom, I just got my DNA results back.

What does it say, honey?

And I said, how the hell am I 12% sub-Saharan Africa 10% this 5%, Then I’m going down the list and my mom says now you know, honey, them tests ain’t science.

They’re just a guest.

That’s funny, although not an uncommon response, right?

Are are you thinking at this point like anything about, you know, am I adopted, is my parent not my parent?

Or are you solely focused on how did all of this stuff get in here?

I think I was in shock.

Connecting the Dots to Her Biological Cuban Father

I think that what was happening to me was happening on the outside of me.

Like, you know, you learn how to compartmentalize when you’re raised in abusive, chaotic situations and you put yourself somewhere else and you know, something else takes over and you’re able to maneuver and speak.

Yeah, but it’s you’re disconnected.

I think I was disconnected.

So like, I’m looking at this stuff and I think it.

I know.

I think I know, but I can’t see it.

And so then I open up, you know, my list of matches.

And the first match I see is my my great aunt.

And so I call my mom back.

And I’m like, mom, I just opened up my matches, you know, and auntie’s here, You know, she’s here.

She’s right here.

You can just tell her all of those nasty rumors about her being adopted are a lie.

She really is your aunt.

I thought I had done some good.

You know, I thought something really beautiful had come out of this test.

And my mom’s.

Well, you know what, Steph?

Thank you.

You know, I’m a let her know.

She’ll be so relieved, like, OK, so then my next match in the list, man, his pictures right there and his name.

I think I’ll call him Gerardo.

I think that’s what I’ll call him to protect the innocent.

And he and I share about 300 centimorgans, right?

And so it says it thinks we’re second cousins, and that’s pretty close.

And I click on his picture and his name, and, you know, he’s Gerardo.

And he was born in Cuba.

And I was like, Cuba.

So I called my mom back, which in retrospect is so stupid of me, you know?

Well, that you’re trying to find answers that makes sense.

It’s your family history.

What does she say?

I said, mom, there’s this guy on here and he, he’s, he’s really close to me.

Like I should know who he is.

Like we share enough DNA, like I should know who he is.

Like maybe I know he’s a cousin or he’s somebody’s kid or something, but I feel like I should know who he is.

Well, what’s his name, honey?

Then I tell her his name and I tell her his last name and she’s like, I, I don’t know, you know, maybe you should, maybe you should reach out to him and I don’t know.

OK, so fine.

So I did, I sent him an e-mail and I was like, and it literally the subject line was how the hell are we related?

And I was like, hey, I just did this DNA test and it’s crazy.

I feel like you’re close enough that I should know who you are.

And, but I don’t have any.

I, I’m, you know, I don’t have family from Cuba.

And I’m at this point I’m thinking, OK, so one of my white relatives married this Cuban person or something, right?

You know, this is where I’m, I’m trying, I’m trying to put this together.

Then I had noticed I have other matches from Puerto Rico and they’re distant.

So I’m like, OK, could be anything.

And he gets back to me like almost right away.

And he, he’s, he was a doctor.

He’s a doctor actually.

And he’s big into genealogy.

His whole family had been tested.

He was all over.

And he’s like, oh, yes, definitely.

We are certainly very closely related.

I can help you figure this out.

And just, and he was just so excited to hear from me.

He was just so excited.

He thought it was the coolest thing ever.

And he’s like, I need you to upload your DNA to Gedmatch.

So ’cause my, my mom and dad are there.

And then that way I can see which side of the family we’re related on and we can work it out from there.

It takes a couple of days in those times.

I don’t know what it’s like now, but to get it uploaded to Gedmatch.

So in the meantime, I’m in this, I’m walking around in this daze and I there’s this really cute kind of tickle.

I can’t explain it any other way this.

And I almost think it’s part of the disconnect, like in my soul that maybe I really am something like it’s this.

It’s almost like this childish kind of dream or something, like, wow, maybe I really am.

Wouldn’t that be cool, ’cause my husband, he used to call me his exotic beauty, you know?

And I love to hear that, but I would always feel guilty because I’m not.

Yeah, I’m just Stephanie, parents from Tennessee and Alabama, you know, I’m just not.

But I love to hear it.

It just made me feel so special, but so like, I was thinking like, well, what if I am like, what?

Wouldn’t that be crazy?

Oh my God.

And then that.

But I’m thinking at this point too, it’s one of my grandparents that had an affair and that one of my parents is not their dad, is not who they think it is.

And again, I think that’s part of that compartmentalization.

I am not dumb.

I am not stupid.

And you want to make it make sense in a way that isn’t harmful directly to you.

You know, my mom is still playing dumb on the phone.

What did that?

What did he say, staff?

What did you know to act like she doesn’t know anything?

And in the meantime, he and I are talking and I’m like, do you have any of your family members who, like went to Tennessee or Alabama where my parents were born?

You know, ’cause I’m thinking it’s that, and he’s like, no, I don’t think so.

Then we find out I’m related on his father’s side for sure.

And he’s like, this is really good, ’cause it’s a small family descended from four men born in Cuba, blah, blah, blah.

It’s going to be easy.

And then he gets back to me and he says, no, I didn’t have any family in Tennessee and Alabama.

The time you were born, I only had the only people there in America were in New York and Detroit.

And when he said Detroit, I was like, fuck, it’s me.

Like I couldn’t not see it anymore.

I knew.

I knew I wasn’t going to get anything from my mom.

I knew, you know, my mom had always been untrustworthy and fast and loose with the truth.

I’m just going to say it that way.

And I knew she wasn’t going to tell me.

She hadn’t told me.

And so I’m like, I’m going to have to figure this out on my own.

So my cousin Gerardo, God bless him, he tells me we have a family Facebook page for our family.

And he’s like, why don’t you go take a look and see if you recognize anybody?

He’s like, there’s a lot of people there.

So it’s like midnight, you know, I’m sitting on the Facebook and I’m in the living room.

It’s all dark, everybody’s in bed.

And I’m looking through this Facebook and I’m looking through all these pictures, all these old pictures, all these new pictures, all these beautiful people.

And I come across this face.

I stop, I stop scrolling, you know, and I’m looking.

So I’m looking at this picture and he has, he has this really thick unibrow.

And I had a freaking unibrow.

My mom would never let me tweeze it.

That was another thing.

People called me Bert in middle school when I was in the suburbs, ’cause I had one eyebrow all the way across.

And so I’m looking in his face and I’m looking in his eyes and I’m trying so hard to connect, to remember, and I can’t, like I can’t stop looking at him, but nothing is clicking.

I’m waiting so hard for something to click, but nothing is clicking.

And then I looked at like the caption to see his name and he had this very weird unique name.

And it rung a bell in my head.

So like I teach and I get, you know, students always have the coolest, wildest name.

So I was always talking about this name that I heard today and this name, and it means this and this name and it means that.

And like things like Jamila, which I think is beautiful and Arabic, like I live in this multicultural area.

And so one time I was talking about this and my mom says, I used to know somebody who had a really weird name.

And I think it had meant something to do with horses or something like that.

And I just was like, oh, that’s cool, that’s interesting.

But that was that was the name.

That was the name.

That was the name I called my cousin.

And I was like, OK, so there’s this person here and his name is this.

And.

And he’s like, yeah, he lived in Detroit.

Yeah, that name runs in my family.

And unfortunately, he’s dead.

He died in 1986.

How do you feel when you hear that?

At that, in that moment, I, I, I was happy that I guess I was.

I had found a connection.

This had all still been like some kind of weird fever dream mystery that I can’t quite explain.

And that finding him and his name and his face made it real in a way that gave me some comfort in a weird way, like this is real and I came from it now a person and all of this stuff I’ve been going through with this whole what are you my whole life.

It made sense.

There’s a reason my mom eventually comes out to the house to visit me a couple weeks later, you know, I don’t know if she’s going to come clean or if she’s going to make more excuses.

She just coming to see what I know.

I don’t know, but by now I already know.

So then, you know, the floodgates open.

She’s been waiting 40 years to tell me all of this.

She loved my father.

It was when she was married to my real dad, the alcoholic, and he was terrible to her.

And then the neighbor, basically they saw each other across the yard and fell in love.

Whatever, he was also married to someone else.

She was married to someone else.

And they had a beautiful love affair and they loved each other and they continued to see each other up until he passed away.

And I said to her, you know, at that moment, I said, you’re lucky he didn’t just die recently or I would never speak to you again.

And I, I shocked myself with that, ’cause I wasn’t even feeling anything yet.

It just kind of flew out of my mouth.

Lucky he died a long time ago, ’cause if he just recently died, I would never speak to you again.

And and then I said, you know, it’s really sad that he died, but you can’t mourn somebody you don’t know.

And then I found out that was not true.

Navigating Freedom from Abuse and New Ethnic Identity

Yeah, I was going to say, you sure can.

So now you’ve got 2 revelations, well, multiple but 22 key revelations, which, you know, anybody who’s experienced an ethnicity shift understands there’s one.

This person who you thought was your quote, real dad is not your dad.

And I, I understand you didn’t have a good relationship with him, but still you thought that that was your biological father.

So there’s that shift and then there’s the ethnicity shift.

Are you being struck by one more than the other at that point in time?

Well, I think for me, finding out my real dad wasn’t my real dad was a bit freeing because he was so awful to me.

And I always felt unloved.

And when you, one of your parents doesn’t love you, makes you feel worthless.

It hurts real bad.

Just to simplify.

So like that he wasn’t.

And then I didn’t have to try to make that man love me anymore like I had been trying for 40 years was very freeing.

I didn’t shed a tear.

My ethnicity, boy, I still struggle.

Like, OK, so at first I was like, Oh my God, this makes so much sense.

I speak Spanish, I dance pichetta, I dance salsa, I dance merengue, cumbia, all of this.

Like, I, I, I, I just, and I started tripping like, is this is this stuff in your jeans?

Like, how do you know?

And I still sometimes wonder, what are the, do our jeans have memory?

What’s in US, you know?

But everything clicked so perfectly as to and then and, and I can’t believe that I looked at this face in the mirror every day and did not know, could not see.

And my mom said that he used to come and see me when I was a kid and that he would, he would show up at the school if I was in a play, he would.

He came to the church when I made my first communion and he just sat in the church by himself and pretended like he was there for somebody else.

Sometimes he would want to see me, so he’d deliver a pizza.

He’d pretend to deliver a pizza and my mom would give me the money to go get the pizza from him.

Wow, so he was in your life, you just didn’t know?

And boy, that hurt.

My mom keeps sending me to this man who doesn’t want to be my father.

And then I have a father who wants to be my father.

And my mother’s like, no, I can’t, I can’t out myself like that.

I, I got, I got a husband here.

I can’t let him know that I did this and this too much shame for me and blah, blah, blah.

Just very simplistically.

But so then I, I went through this kind of, I don’t know, flourishing of my identity.

I was like, OK.

Like I, I’m, I’m Cuban.

Like I can tell people I’m Cuban now when they ask me, as they always do.

I can be Cuban now and I can embrace this.

That I’m not perpetrating like all my life.

I, I, I think I’m white.

I’m telling people I’m native and I’m perpetrating being Mexican just to be left alone by the wider society just so I can be.

And now I can be something and I, I am something.

And my cousin and other cousins and other people are more than happy to help me, you know, connect.

And I keep meeting more and more of the family.

I even went on a pilgrimage to Cuba with another NPE.

Late life NPE cousin of mine, just like me, found out her father wasn’t her father.

We met on Ancestry and we took our poor husbands and drove across Cuba in this insane pilgrimage all the way to the end of Cuba.

And it was incredible and amazing.

But then I started having these weird identity problems.

My husband told me right after I found out he’s like, babe, don’t go getting an identity crisis on me, you know?

And I said, I think I’ve always had one.

I think this is the cure.

And so I felt good for a while, like, I’m Cuban, this is great, I’m Cuban, this is awesome.

And then for some reason I started having this weird backlash, which is what I wanted to kind of ask you about.

Like, so do I get to be Cuban?

If I wasn’t Cuban, can I be Cuban?

I wasn’t raised Cuban, just like I knew I couldn’t be Native American in the student association because I wasn’t Native American.

So am I really Cuban?

Has the fact that I was white tainted my ethnicity as a Latina?

Can I be a Latina or is it tainted?

And I, I asked my Hispanic friends, God bless them, ’cause they put up, they give me a lot of therapy.

Like, do I get to be what I am?

And they were like, you are what you are.

And and you had, but I didn’t have the experience.

Like, what do you mean you didn’t have the experience?

You’ve been out there your whole life.

You found refuge in your people.

What do you mean?

And then I went through a phase where I couldn’t speak Spanish anymore.

Like I felt like my Spanish wasn’t good enough.

I had to get a therapist who spoke Spanish to help me learn to speak Spanish again.

Wow, so.

The Struggle to ‘Earn’ a Newly Discovered Identity

Like do you, I mean.

No it.

So, well, yeah, do you feel, do you feel like you can be black, authentically black, that you weren’t black?

Do you feel like you can still be Mexican even if you’re not Mexican?

Yeah, wow.

So it’s funny because I I host these support groups every month, and last night was one of them.

And someone asked me if there’s anything that still comes up for me almost five years in, because I’ve done so much processing and, you know, talking to people.

And if through my conversations, things still come up.

And I realized the thing that is hardest for me still is the ethnicity piece.

I fully made peace with everything that happened with my parents and them lying to me.

And I, you know, have accepted the relationship that I have with my biological father and he’s wonderful.

And I, I think I’ve made peace with all of that.

But the ethnicity piece is something that I feel like will be a lifelong processing.

Because when you said do I do I get to say I’m Cuban when I haven’t been Cuban, right?

When you haven’t had that experience, you’ve always been, but you haven’t had that lived experience.

And that’s how I feel about my blackness is it is not my lived experience.

Until I was 35 years old, I did not live as a black woman.

I also felt, though, like I struggled to fully connect with the Mexican side of my family.

Like, that wasn’t something when you’re talking about how you look kind of like assimilated into like the Mexican.

I think it’s really interesting because you did have, you know, like Hispanic roots that you didn’t know about.

And it felt natural to you to like, assimilate, even though Mexicans are and Cubans are not the same.

But it still was something that you were able to connect to.

For me, I didn’t feel super connected to it.

I felt like I was trying to feel connected to it.

But I always attributed that to being multiethnic, to having a white mom and not growing up close to my Mexican family.

Like, you know, geographically and stuff.

We’d go visit them, but I lived in southern Arizona, so there’s kind of like this flavor of Mexican to everything and everyone because of where we are.

And I kind of just was comfortable with that.

But I never fully felt, yeah, like I’m Mexican.

Like this is this is me, this is.

So I’ve always felt my friends and I like we describe ourselves as liminal, always in between.

And that’s really how I’ve always felt.

And I feel like I still feel that way, except now I just have more clarity on to the other part that that makes me me.

I had a conversation with a friend who’s biracial and he has a a black father and a white mother.

And I was talking about not fully feeling like I belong and not feeling comfortable about what I can claim.

And he told he was like, kind of like your your family and friends like, well, you just are.

You don’t, you don’t have to earn it.

It’s what you are.

And when he said you don’t have to earn it, I almost started crying because it was like, that’s I think what I still struggle.

With is I feel like I don’t get to.

Claim that because I didn’t earn that I haven’t lived that my whole life, but because I’m biracial, I will still get question what what are you and to feel like you have to explain it still.

I think it’s it’s where it just you butt up more against it because it’s not like people just see even for you.

I’m sure still.

I mean, I feel like people are a little less intrusive about asking what your ethnic background.

Is for sure.

But you know, people still are going to probably look at you and wonder in their mind and it may come up as a question at some point.

And then you have to explain yourself.

And so I think it’s having to explain.

And I think the other piece that, and I’ve I’ve touched on this before, but like that’s been hard, I think is when people would ask me before if I was black or for you, you know, asking, calling you Taco, which is so ridiculous.

But like assuming that you were Hispanic and then you’re actively denying it for so long.

It’s like, what does that do to your brain to spend like decades saying, Nope, that’s not, that’s not me.

I’m white.

Or for me, I’m like, no, I’m Mexican and white and this is what I am.

And I can’t help how genetics work.

This is just what I look like.

And then all of a sudden you’re like, oh, wait.

So not only have I been in in denial of what’s in front of me because I believe my parents, but I’ve actually been actively denying when people made assumptions.

And now I have to change that thinking in my brain.

So that’s a very long answer to your question.

Finding Peace and Connection Through Cuban Roots

But like that’s I’m still, yeah, I’m still processing it.

Me too, 10 years in and you know when I was white and people asked me what are you?

I didn’t have an answer ’cause I was white.

At least I have an answer now.

So I, I, I, I, I like it that I can give it an honest answer, not a lie that my mom told me to try to cover up the way I look and not just letting people believe I was something else so they would leave me alone.

I, I love having an answer.

And I’m real sad about the loss of my culture, of course.

And I know a lot of people talk about this, which is why I, I didn’t really go over it too much, but loss of my father, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles.

So maybe people would look at me and be like, Oh my God, you look just like your grandma.

Or, you know, you reminded me of your father when he was young.

I lost so much.

I lost so much culture.

And I’m grateful to the Mexican family, you know, who took me in and just made me feel like part of their family, like legitimately part of their families and gave me that space to just be Stephanie, like to just be Stephanie.

And I, I did wonder when I was white and people always wanted to know, like, what are you?

And I didn’t really have an answer.

You know, I’m like, what?

Why do we need to know what I am?

Do you have to put me in some box?

Why do we have to know what a person is before we can continue a conversation?

Have you been able to explore more of the the Cuban specifically and like connect with other Cuban people?

I have, I have a big family.

I have two sisters.

It just didn’t work out.

It just didn’t work.

They were just too undone by what their father had done.

We met a couple times, they showed me some pictures, but we just couldn’t do it.

They have family.

They have like home videos of him that they wouldn’t, wouldn’t share with me and that that kind of cruelty breaks my heart.

Like, they have videos of my father walking and talking and I can’t see them.

But going to Cuba.

And then I have family in Cuba still.

I have family here in Florida.

I have family here in Wisconsin.

And they have all, everyone except my sisters have all opened their arms to me and taught me so much about my grandparents and my aunts and my uncles and my great grandparents.

And yeah, I’ve been down to Miami a lot, you know, going to restaurants and, but I’ve been to Cuba a few Times Now.

I’m really sad about the situation there right now.

Of course, I pray for better things for everyone.

When I went to Cuba on that pilgrimage and then I, I recorded it all like, ’cause who?

Who goes to Cuba, right?

And nobody, almost.

So in one of the videos, I’m just like, I’m here, I’m in Cuba, you know, I saw El Yunque today, which is this mountain in this area of Cuba where my family was from and that I had seen picture upon picture.

I’m gonna cry again.

It, it has been so, so beautiful and so wonderful to walk the streets.

My father walked.

And I went to the church where he was baptized, where he got married, where he was born.

And I’ve been welcomed by all of the people there.

And it has really filled the holes in my heart and I’m better now.

I speak Spanish again.

I still get rusty sometimes I freeze.

I literally freeze.

Like I can’t understand a word you’re saying.

Like I I get this weird mental block.

But I’m getting better.

And therapy is key.

I know a lot of people say that, but therapy.

I had been seeing a therapist since I found out.

I bought a necklace with the Cuban Our Lady of Charity, Nuestra Senora de la Caridad, like the Cuban Our Lady of Guadalupe.

I have one of those and I wear it proudly.

I actually changed my name.

My mother told me that my father wanted to claim me and she wouldn’t let him.

And so I changed my name.

I changed my middle name too.

It was like, I think my father might would have liked to name me something besides Stephanie and my sister’s like, you can’t, you got to be Stephanie.

And I was like, OK, I’ll just change my middle name.

So I’ve claimed it and and I think people should claim it.

Claim it, it’s yours.

Like you said, it’s rough sometimes, but the the end line, the goal is definitely the piece and I get closer to piece every year.

That’s amazing.

The full piece.

Guidance for Navigating Identity and Family Secrets

What would you like for people to understand about how an ethnicity DNA surprise effects people or has affected you?

I think like you said, the country has gotten better at not asking people what they are all the time.

But from my experience, because of all that othering that I just could not understand when I was white, I just could not understand it it it made sense to me when I found out the truth, but I was still able to block so much of the truth.

I think my advice would be you don’t have to ask permission.

You don’t have to ask permission to be what you are.

I felt like I needed permission from the Hispanic community or from the, I don’t know, the gods of race or racial divides that I could be what I am because my therapist was like, I’d like, I feel like I need validation.

Like I need somebody to be like, give me the stamp of OK, Stephanie, you can be Hispanic now.

And he was like, there is no such committee.

You know, you have to claim it yourself and it is who you are.

So that’s what I would say.

You don’t need to seek outward validation.

When you come to terms with who you are, claim who you are, be who you are.

Go learn about what is Ireland is like, take a trip to Ghana.

Go wherever it is that your people are from and claim that heritage.

You don’t need to ask permission or apologize that the people who hid it from you are the ones who need to apologize.

What advice do you have for a parent who’s keeping adna surprise from their child?

Stop lying.

I’m not going to be very magnanimous on this, just it, it doesn’t.

It’s like if you smoke.

I’ve been smoking for 30 years, why am I going to quit now?

It’s always good to stop doing bad things, no matter when it is.

So just because you’ve been lying for 15 years doesn’t mean you keep lying.

Stop lying and.

What advice do you have for someone who just uncovered Adna Surprise?

You’re going to go through it.

It’s going to be painful, disorienting.

You’re going to be grieving.

You’re going to be in shock.

You’re going to be stressed out.

You are probably going to be undone by how much it bothers you.

My advice, don’t worry about how much it bothers you, don’t worry about how you feel, don’t question whether or not you should still be sad.

Just accept what’s happening and work your way through it.

All of it is normal and just wondering why and thinking why.

And I can’t believe this is not helpful.

It’s a life altering, shattering just.

It’s a devastating thing to go through and you’re going to go through it.

You’ll be better on the other side.

But fighting the way you’re feeling and questioning your feelings is not helpful.

It’s not going to help you get there.

Well said, Stephanie, thank you so much for joining me today.

Concluding Thoughts and Podcast Information

It was really awesome to have the opportunity to connect with someone who understands the twofold aspect to adna surprise, finding out that your father isn’t your father, but also that ethnicity shift.

And I wish you the best as you continue to navigate this journey and and find that place of peace.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks again to Stephanie for sharing her story.

If you have Adna Surprise that you’d like to share, please submit your story at dnasurprises.com and for early ad free access to episodes, join me over on patreon@patreon.com/DNA Surprises.

Until next time, DNA Surprises is hosted, produced and edited by me, Alexis Oursalt.

It is mixed and mastered by Josh Oursalt of Siren Recording Studios.