Finding My Birth Parents
Three years ago I was in the midst of building my career, going back to school, and paying off the small amount of debt I’d taken on in my late teens and early twenties. I was shouldering a workload that I now realize was way too much. For the first time in a long time, I was dealing with an abundance of opportunity and not a lack of it. So I wasn’t about to take it for granted. I volunteered for everything. I took accelerated college courses on the weekends. I begged my boss for more responsibility. (Because who needs to sleep when there’s coffee and wifi?)
I thought I had to make up for lost time. No longer earning below the poverty line and scrambling to take care of Maslow’s most basic needs, I finally had the time to think about growth and not just survival. I tried to work twice as fast as my peers to catch up to them. My schedule was tight. Panic attacks and all-nighters weren’t unheard of. It was a time where I couldn’t afford a single interruption to my routine. So of course, it was at this precise time in my life that I would find my birth parents.
2015
By then, I’d almost forgotten about the 23andMe kit I’d submitted nearly a year ago. At the time the $100 price tag of the kit was not something I could afford. But I’d done it anyway. I thought of it like a lottery ticket — the odds small, but the payoff large enough to make me want to take a chance. When I dropped the kit off in the mailbox, it felt like I had just done something big. Something life-changing.
I waited weeks for the kit to be processed. One morning I got an email that the processing was complete and I excitedly logged into the website, holding my breath as I waited for the fancy animations and graphs to load on the page.
And…nothing.
Nobody in their database except some distant relatives. Very distant relatives. <0.05% shared DNA between us. And no. None of them had heard of my birth mother before. And none of them were adoptees either. They were mostly hobbyists and people with an interest in their genealogy, curious to find out more about their families. I remember being resentful of that at the time — I mean, they already knew who most of their families were. Why were they even on this stupid website?
The novelty of it wore off within a week and I stopped logging in. And you already know what happened next. Life took off. I moved to Dallas and accepted a dev job, and then another. I started making some good money. And for the first time in my life, I could provide for myself. I moved on.
2016
I still wondered about my biological parents from time to time. But now I was starting to envision a future where none of it mattered. Where my lack of a relationship with either set of my parents — adoptive and biological — was no longer a wound that defined me. I’d go back to school and get my degree and it would be like I’d never dropped out of school. I’d build my skills and my career and people would forget where I came from, if they ever knew at all. I would become so self-sufficient and strong that nobody and nothing would ever be able to hurt me. (Spoiler: life doesn’t work that way.)
I was 23 years old and exploring wedding venues on my lunch break when I got the email. You have new relatives on 23andMe. Log in to find out more. I’d gotten the same email dozens of times before, and it was always the same. More distant relatives who’d never heard of my birth mother before. But I logged in anyway. And I saw it. 5% shared DNA. I sent them a message.
This person had heard of my birth mother before. And they gave me the final key that I needed to unlock the puzzle I’d been trying to solve all my life: her middle name. Shortly after, I was buried under an avalanche of information. Being able to search for her with her middle name meant unearthing all sorts of information. Previous addresses. Marriage records. Old blog entries. I found her on Facebook and reached out to her. She replied days later and soon we were on a video call. She cried a lot; I couldn’t. I was too stunned. We talked until midnight, trying to catch up on decades of memories in the span of a few hours.
I remember it being too much for me and feeling a sense of indignation at the universe — I asked why now, of all times? Before this, I had been in the process of reinventing myself and moving on from my past. I wouldn’t say I was happy, but I’d been doing okay. I didn’t have time to think about this right now.
2017
My birth mother told me my biological father’s name. I was firing up my laptop and preparing to start the research process all over again when I paused.
Pursuing my biological father would be the next task in a list that never seemed to be complete. I was realizing that now. It would never be enough — not just with my family, either. All of it. No career accomplishment or amount of money earned, no educational achievement, no savings milestone would ever make me feel “safe”. My anxiety wasn’t environmental; I carried it with me wherever I went. What did I really want with my biological father? For him to be a good man? Someone I could be proud of? Or maybe the inverse: someone who would be proud of me and all that I had accomplished in the years following my estrangement from my adoptive parents.
I wanted him to be the thing that would fix everything.
Bathed in the blue glow of my laptop at 3 a.m., my now-husband snoring next to me in bed, I realized how insane that sounded. So I shut my laptop and went to sleep. For the most part, I avoided the reality of my biological father for the next year and a half. I needed a break. We were closing on our first home in a matter of weeks and my job stress had reached new heights. I felt like I was going to buckle under the weight of it all.
2018
After a hellish start to the year, I accepted a new job and had a week off in between companies. In a moment of bravery, I did the researching I’d been stalling for so long. I determined that my biological father was deceased, and had been since 2010.
I ordered his death certificate from the California Department of Health and paid $50 for overnight shipping. When it got here, it told me that he’d died of a heart attack, and that he’d worked as a delivery man for a paint store. Mother’s name unknown, Indonesia. Father, just a first initial and last name, also Indonesia. I wondered if they were still alive. I couldn’t begin to think about searching internationally for my grandparents, who might not speak any English, who probably don’t know I exist. Just thinking about it made me tired. Here I was again, getting sucked into the cycle of a never-ending search for answers, holding my breath and traversing my family tree looking for someone who might solve a problem I didn’t know how to put into words.
And it turns out that my dad had two daughters after me. They live in San Francisco. And as I write this post, I am visiting San Francisco. I don’t have their phone number, no contact information other than their address. In moments of borderline insanity, I’m tempted to go knock on their door. “Hey there, I’m your dad’s love child from the 90s that you didn’t know existed. Want to grab coffee?”
I also found out where my father is buried, not far from here, in Daly City. And now I’m faced with more decision paralysis. Do I go see his grave? What would seeing his grave feel like? Can you mourn someone you have never known? I fear the answer is yes. And once again, it feels like too much to handle right now. So I walk the streets of this city like a tourist, ignoring the little voice in my head that wonders why I’d bother going to see the Golden Gate Bridge when another decidedly more personal landmark sits unvisited, miles away.
For the last three years of my life I’ve been a detective, collecting breadcrumbs of lives lived parallel to mine, spying on strangers who share my DNA. My father passed away in 2010. I was 17 at the time and studying for my SATs, oblivious and at peace. The biggest problems I thought that I had at the time were college applications and prom dresses. Maybe this was a good thing, not having to know about his death during such an evolving time in my life.
My mother was a homeless teen in San Francisco when she gave birth to me. And now I’m in San Francisco, walking to my job every morning and passing homeless people on every corner, trying to ignore the weird mix of guilt and relief for being so far removed from that reality, happy that I have no memory of staying in a women’s shelter at 18 months old, carted around in a filthy stroller and stealing food. To be born in poverty, return to it briefly in my late teens, and then climb to a place of comfort and privilege in the span of a few years is disillusioning experience. (I’m reminded of Jeanette Walls’ account of seeing her homeless mother digging through garbage from the back of a cab in Manhattan.)
The other night, I saw a man toss a lit cigarette on a woman sleeping under a bench and reacted with a kind of visceral anger that surprised myself. I’d love to be able to say that this was because I care that much about the homeless, about littering, about basic human decency. The truth is, I just felt attacked. As though he had thrown that cigarette on me. This dichotomy of identities is something I’m still learning how to handle. It’s like I’m half in and half out, deeply connected with people who never seem to have enough and people who have everything they could ever need.
If there’s anything here worth taking away, it’s the bittersweet reminder that much of the control that we think we exercise over our lives is an illusion. I didn’t ask for any of this; I didn’t ask to be born. My father died before I could meet him, and this was always going to be the case. I didn’t get to meet my mother until I was 23 years old. For a while I replayed my life thus far over and over again, wondering how it could have been different. If only my mom had done this. If only my dad had been there. And lastly, if only I’d been adopted by different people.
Anxiety is often the result of trying to control the uncontrollable, to influence the unchangeable. Slowly, I’ve come to accept that another person’s presence or absence in my life can’t break or fix me. I’ve tried my best to begin trusting the timing of my life, hoping that when I’m ready to see the answer I’m looking for, it will appear. And honestly, I’m just ready to chill out a little bit. It’s been so long since I’ve done that. I don’t remember what it feels like to have a quiet mind. I want to re-learn. And so I won’t knock on that door while I’m in San Francisco this week, and I won’t go visit that grave. Not this time, and maybe not ever.
