Identity Lost and Found

         Knowing my mother was knowing a playful woman with a large heart who loved me more than anything. She always came home with a plastic bag of toys from the dollar store, and if not supplied me with all the care I could get. My dad was also a loving person. When I was younger he would spin my in the air like a helicopter and I would laugh and laugh. Eventually I started seeing him less and less. My mom said he was sick and in a place where he could get better, the hospital. It began to seem normal without him around, still each day he was in my thoughts.

         There were many nights that went by when my mom would come home and sob so pitifully in her room. I found this out when I went passed her room one night to sneak a snack and paused when I heard muffled sniffles beyond her door. Once I asked her about it and she said she was fine and gave me a weary smile. It happened many times like this, but she never cried in front of me or told me what was wrong. She knew I was too young to understand.

         One young night I laid asleep in my yellow flowery room and my mom gently awoke me with the opening of my door. She moved slowly but with an urgency that made my small immature body feel an uneasy sense throughout. As she floated closer I noticed a few other shadowy figures as my eyes adjusted to the dim light given off by my seashell nightlight. I looked upon her face to see heavily exhausted features and tears rolling down saturating them.

         That night I didn’t know what to think, I was so confused and scared. She knelt beside my bed trembling and pulled me into her arms. Emotion overcame me before I even had the chance to hear a word, and I wept. She spoke between jerky breaths, “Your daddy’s gone.”

         All the more was I confused that I frantically glanced around looking for some sort of explanation. Nothing came. We both sat there, a melancholy chorus of weeping. Everything from then was forgotten, including the sense of having a normal family.

         Ten years from then my mom pulled up to the school. A more mature, high-school version of myself walked up to the car and got in a usual. Another day of school completed. Another day I’ve grown. By now we’ve learned to function together with just each other. The past was in the past, and we didn’t really talk about it. As we drove off, we pleasantly talked about our days and what was for dinner. There was a loose hesitation in her voice that I failed to catch when she tried to change the subject. I rambled on garrulously until she finally managed, “There’s something we have to talk about.”

         “Tell me,” I said curiously.

         She hesitated more nervously, “I will when we get home.”

         During the rest of the ride she went on as if she hadn’t said anything, trying to get me to forget she had, but I was still very concerned about it.

         I bugged her persistently the rest of the day, but I always got an excuse to why she couldn’t tell me then. It went on for more than a week.

         One day, after it had been long dark, she told me to sit down on the couch while she paced uncomfortably to the nearest chair. She looked at me as if she had done something awful and I was the one about to reprimand her. I couldn’t imagine what it was and wasn’t sure if I wanted to know after all.

         “It’s very hard to tell you this, but your daddy is not your real dad,” she said at last, then sat giving me that same look she had been earlier, that pitiful look of dread and anticipation.

         Shock and confusion went through me as I saw the world turning upside-down before my eyes. “Then who is?”

         “I don’t know,” she replied softly.

         Those strangely familiar tears of confusion rolled down my cheeks, bringing me back to my childhood bed where I learned my dad passed away, a memory long stored away by constraint and brought back as if he were passing for the second time.

         She didn’t move, just kept her eyes intently on me as matter dissolved around me. She became a woman I knew and didn‘t know at the same time. I gripped the couch to make sure it was still a couch. My whole house seemed like an unfamiliar house, and I was just a person I didn’t even know. Things I was so sure I knew, I doubted. Reality left at once, and so did my identity. That strange woman walked towards me, hugged me, and wept with me.

         Gradually my mother told me about how I was conceived, how my life could be attributed in part to a shipment from the cryogenic sperm bank. Reality soon returned but failed to bring with it my sense of self. I dealt with harsh realizations such as my family not being my biological family at all. My grandma, one of the most influential people in my life, I found, wasn’t even related to me. I felt ripped off. I felt isolated. I especially didn’t like the fact that half of me was made from a guy in California who, as far as I was concerned, was a faceless stranger. I was relieved to know I was planned, but that didn’t get me any closer to knowing who I was.

         The next time we met with my “family,” I felt so out of place. As they talked, I just looked at them and thought how I wasn't them. I felt like a fraud. When I went to school I felt invisible. The other students knew their parents, siblings, maybe even their whole ancestry, but not me. There were so many possibilities as to who I was, because there were so many possibilities as to who I came from. Even my mom, who had raised me from birth, didn’t know. I’d sit and run through my mind what he might be like. Was he friendly? Did he have my eyes? Did he have my sense of humor? Was he someone famous? Would he make me proud to be his daughter?

         It took some time to get used to that news my mother told me that night. Soon enough, I began to understand that families can be many things. After discovering the possibility of having siblings, I found my half-sister through the internet. I learned that her parents used the same service as my mother because they couldn‘t conceive for another unconventional reason, they were lesbians. And I found out that three of my cousins from my dad’s side of the family (where I felt so out of place) were adopted, making them no more or less family than me.

         My mom has always been there, and I hope she always will be. I’ll miss my dad just as much, because he raised me, loved me, and made me who I am today. And just because my grandma’s not related, doesn’t mean I can’t be inspired by her or consider her my family. My donor’s out there somewhere, and it will be great when I find him to see what he’s like, what we share in common, or even if we look like each other. My hope is that, by meeting my donor, I will gain just a little better understanding of my background and a better appreciation of my unique qualities.

         But I feel much stronger today, not because I know more about him, but because I know that who I am is based on much more than the contributors of my DNA. I found my identity in a group of people that cared about me regardless of my circumstances. And that group of people may be an unconventional family, but it’s still a family to me.