Are you there, Dad? It’s me, Erika.

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It happened fast, as upending revelations do. I was home from the dorms on a Saturday eleven years ago. As my sack of laundry tumbled to softness for another week’s wear, I thumbed through stacks of photos on the dining room table. My mom was in the process of sorting them into two piles, one for her and one for my dad. Their divorce was in its endgame–the two of them weary from battle, but entrenched in it still.

The late morning light filtered through the windows the color of iced tea. I picked up a stack of school photos of goofy looking cousins on my dad’s side, all of them in varying stages of kidness, a missing tooth here, a cowlick there. All of them with twinkles in their eyes, all of them with dimples, marks of another tribe. I flipped through them quickly, like trading cards, unaware that the question I was about to ask my mom in the nonchalant spirit of passing time would change everything.

“Why do all the other grandkids look like grandma while I don’t?”

Even my brother Luke had that playful glint, unlike me, my teatime eyes telling old soul tales from the stack. In that instant, my mom hesitated. Anyone else might not have noticed.

“Mom, why do all the other grandkids look like grandma?”

She fell into a chair, startled, stunned, caught, her dust rag suddenly moot. To this day, I don’t understand how the next question came to me so clearly.

“Mom — is dad my real dad?”

In the minutes that followed I learned that my dad is not my biological father. I learned that they had wanted to tell me the truth so many times, but that my dad was petrified that the truth would strip him of his fatherhood, that I wouldn’t love him anymore. I learned that a close friend of my mom’s, a man I’d known my entire life, is likely my biodad. I left the apartment, my laundry tumbling in the basement, and drove.

Eleven years later, my dad and I are strangers, not because of the paternity issue, but for other reasons. I haven’t seen him in more than five years, but I think about him everyday. I’m weary from managing the emotions he stirs in me–confusion, anger, sadness, loss, abandonment, disappointment. My brother and I talk about him only rarely. When we do, we are comrades from a distant war, braced against the railing of ghosts, fused by the story only the two of us know in common.

I write this now because a month ago the novella of my true paternity rubbed the sleepers from its eyes and stumbled into the adjacent room of my tidy, well-lit life. The man who might be my biological father (known more succinctly as PBD, or Possible Biodad) called my mom at work. He told her that he’d found a shoebox full of pictures and cards I’d colored for him when I was little, that he’d tried to find me through the phone book, that he wants to know me.

She reported this to me over dinner one night with the consternation of a disaster correspondent and, as I absorbed every last syllable, my heart detonated balloons of questions, raining confetti over the landscape of everything I am.

In the weeks since PBD’s expressed interest, my mom has acted dutifully as the go-between– on her one side, a man just past 60, eager and ready to step into a role long denied, and on her other side, a woman just past 30 harboring a broken heart from the only dad she ever knew, but curious to know more intimately the source of her propensities toward rumination and sarcasm, as well as her other numerous idiosyncrasies.

Back and forth my mom facilitated the beginnings of a reunion, never disowning her role in this novella’s genesis, unfaltering in her loyalty to the child in all this, me, and my wish to know for certain, once and for all, that I am linked by double helix to PBD.

Eleven years in the making and the moment of my reconception occurred last week, via four oversized Q-tips. A woman named Cindy (who with her tapered, stonewashed jeans, spearmint gum, and feathery hair, gave me the idea that her boyfriend is a tattooed biker guy who happens also to read Nietzsche) concentrated as she rotated each of the four swabs on the fleshy insides of my cheeks. She sealed the samples in an envelope, took a surprisingly good Polaroid of me, and told me to expect results in five business days. (PBD had been told the same upon his swabbing the previous day.)

My mom would say that she’s been sure of my true parentage for 30 years. However, somewhere in the blur of my 20s I was told that there was another contender, so I haven’t felt as sure. There were nights when I would get out the one picture I have of PBD and hold it next to the one picture I have of Contender #2. I would stare into their still-life eyes, probing for clues, wondering about every little thing any girl in normal circumstances takes for granted about her father. How does he take his coffee? Does he cry? How does he look in a suit? English or math? Dylan or Sondheim? What would he say to me over plates of spaghetti? Would he know me from a stranger?

The past week has been hard. I decided, though, that I want it to be PBD because he is already a 3-dimensional character in my life. I have memories of him in our driveway, wearing mirrored sunglasses. I remember him taking me for a ride on his motorcycle, hugging the exit loop off Hwy 12 with such care. I remember his unexpected collection of turtle figurines when my mom and I dropped by his house one time, BJ Thomas’ Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head playing on the stereo as they talked in the kitchen. Contender #2 is just a pixel, 2-dimensional in a curled photograph, eternally (and unfortunately) clothed in a late 1970s prom tuxedo complete with ruffled shirt.

Cindy said five business days.

Jenn consoled me when, on the fifth business day, the results did not come. My mom and brother checked on me, too. On the seventh day, yesterday, I called Cindy. I told her about my last few anxious trips to the mailbox. She apologized and explained that the results had been faxed to their office yesterday, that she couldn’t give them to me over the phone, but that I could pick them up in person or she would be happy to fax them to me. Given that I don’t own a fax machine or a team of huskies to pull my equally hypothetical sled, I felt landlocked, my stomach pulping itself as I sat on the arm of our overstuffed chair, so close to knowing the truth. Thanks to Google and Jenn’s calm coaching, I learned that the local pharmacy accepts faxes on behalf of customers. I called Cindy back and, within minutes, was at the pharmacy, waiting for the incoming beep of my paternity.

All week I’ve felt conflicted about writing this story here, so publicly. I contemplated that which separates the sacred from the inconsequential. I considered my audience, the diverse range of you, and wondered if this is too personal, how you might feel to be trusted with the gravity of my experience as it’s happening. I weighed whether I could accept it if, once out there, my story garnered little to no reaction at all. In the end, I chose to write it for me. Words pull me together.

The pharmacy tech let me have the fax at no charge, an act of sympathy, perhaps.

This is it, I thought. I fumbled the corner of the cover sheet not unlike a boy undoing a bra. The pages separated. I ransacked the report for the conclusion, the finite bottom line that would either cradle or crumble me in an instant.

Allele size. Locus. Paternity Index. Alleged.

At last, I found the number I needed to find.

I beamed, exorcised of doubt, light as air, and hastened outside where Jenn waited in our silently idling hybrid. I showed her the page and we drove home.

Thirty years in the making, the truth is mine.

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Filed under adoption, family, lifepath, reflection