Radio Times (Parts One and Two)
By Pamela Hetherington
PART ONE
***
I was driving through the school drop-off line on the morning of June 13, 2019, when I casually decided to turn on my car radio.
I never listen to the radio in my car, so I don’t know what compelled me to do so that day, at that moment. I can’t explain how, or why, but some force turned my hand to the radio dial.
I tuned in to WHYY just as a story began about a woman named Dani Shapiro, and how her life literally began at The Farris Institute for Parenthood, an artificial insemination clinic at the University of Pennsylvania that existed from 1950 until the mid-1970s. To make a long story short, a home DNA test revealed that Dani’s biological father was not the man who raised her. As I’m sitting there, listening to her story unfold, the first thought that crosses my mind is, “this is what happened to me.” This is why my hand turned on the radio at the moment it did.
***
Rewind with me to a year earlier, when I received the results of my first fun take-home DNA test from 23andMe. My husband bought us all tests for Christmas, as was the trend that year. I read the results out loud and off-hand. I was expecting to see a mix of Polish and Albanian genes, but as I started to read aloud, my most dominant genes were … Swedish and Albanian. I was nonplussed, because I had been told my whole life that my father was 100% dyed-in-the-wool Polish and my mother was half Polish and half Albanian, with my maternal grandmother claiming 100% Polish ancestry. My maiden name, Kuklinski, was one of those Polack names that made people squint up their eyes and mispronounce in halted syllables. When I was little, we collected our old clothes and toys for a needy church in Poland. I had dolls dressed in Polish folk costumes, and we hid a blessed Communion wafer as a game on Christmas Eve. Like, we were Polish-Polish.
I even recall pulling up a world map that day and looking at the distance from Sweden to Poland, rationalizing that perhaps I’d uncovered a new family funny! We weren’t Polacks after all! All those Polack jokes were for naught! Actually, our ancestors were Swedish, and see, they must have traveled across the Baltic Sea at some point and settled in Poland, adopted Polish names, and immigrated to the United States from a Polish seaport. Isn’t that crazy/haha! So crazy that I recall telling some friends about it, under the guise of “here’s my 23andMe dinner party story.” It was a story, all right.
Back to June 13, 2019. I listened to the whole story in the car, transfixed. Then, I went home and listened to the whole story again on the WHYY website. I looked up Dani Shapiro’s book and read excerpts, the entire time thinking, I bet this is what happened to me.
But it was two more years, sometime in the Fall of 2021, before I would open up the 23andMe website again and click on “relatives.” As soon as I clicked on it and started to see names of 2nd cousins I didn’t recognize, who had parents and grandparents with last names I’d never seen before, and - admittedly a shock to my Philly exceptionalist system - they all hailed from the Midwest. It was a calm, quiet confirmation from a deep place of knowing, because I’d known all along.
***
The first person who responded to my messages on 23andMe was Lisa, my second cousin, once removed. She lived in Columbus, Ohio and owned her own landscaping business. “I’m a business owner, too!,” I wrote, hoping to forge an immediate bond with a distant relative by way of sperm donation. She warmed up to my story and sent me the little family information that she had. New family funny: my real family was quite Midwestern - all farmers - and it had a whole mess of people in it. In fact, the great-great-grandparents that we shared had bore no less than twelve children each, and Lisa only had partial names for most of them. But when she sent me her photo, I looked at it and I saw someone who looked like me. We had the same eye color.
***
Emily, my third cousin, hailed from Chicago and was the next and last person to reply to my 23andMe DMs, (I was super sliding into all kinds of inboxes those days). She mentioned a few more names that overlapped mildly with Lisa’s information and encouraged me kindly to keep searching. She was a new mom and her eyes were ice blue like mine, too.
***
I took a second ancestry.com DNA test, (Ancestry far outpaced 23andMe) and I also took a third DNA test through myheritage.com, (this website was the weakest). My goal was to find as many relatives as possible. Even across all three tests, I never had any home run hits on relatives. The folks who popped up all led me down endless rabbit holes. For every hour of searching, I’d find one tiny glint of helpful information, which I dutifully plugged into a disorganized iPhone note. Without a first cousin match, and with me making rookie genealogy mistakes, I surely took the long way. The only ways I kept track of “not my father” was formatting names with strikethroughs and identifying “maybe my father” by bolding the text. “High possibilities” were bolded and italicized.
***
Every morning for a year, I would wake up and check my websites for new relatives. Every morning for a year, I’d spend at least an hour researching names on my new family tree. Often, more. I wouldn’t say it was an obsession. It was comforting to search, because the searching finally soothed a part of myself that had always felt rootless and isolated and like I was missing the key part of a cosmic inside joke. It was more than enough to know that I hadn’t been making those feelings up, that I had actually experienced the truest form of bodily displacement.
Funny story: many years ago, a super keen kid student of mine looked at me, being my weirdo self, and said, “you know, you’re like an alien from another planet.” That kid saw me better than anyone I’d ever met in my entire life. Aliens became my thing, from that point forward. I wore them on my sneakers, T-shirts, and a green alien became my studio mascot.
Sad story: as far back as kindergarten, I always struggled with circles. I always seemed to attract bullies, thieves, liars, fakes, just ill-intentioned people, who would trick me with kindness or scare me with empty threats and inevitably lead me into unsafe, chaotic places, first to take advantage of me and then, to distract me, and then to leave me, somewhere in the dark. Time and again, as I pulled myself out of the holes I had dug, I would be so ashamed, but now I knew why I was so easily led astray. I had literally no idea where I belonged.
PART TWO
It took me twelve months, almost to the day, of dedicated daily searching to find my biological father.
***
Sometime in September of 2022, I thought I had narrowed the possibility down to one person. I figured out my last set of grandparents, finally, and lo and behold, their family had one son. Success! But not so fast…that son was actually my uncle.There was quite a bit online about this not-my-father/uncle, and I was even able to find him in his high school yearbooks. He was tall like me, but he didn’t look like me, and his life story didn’t make sense. For one, this potential dad had never left Central Illinois. Along with not figuring out my paternity, I had not yet figured out the second mystery: how my father’s sperm had found its way to Philadelphia in early 1979.
I was pretty advanced in my family tree searching by then. I hadn’t considered my uncle’s brother, because I didn’t know he had a brother. He was born after the 1950 census, so my preliminary searches hadn’t turned him up, and he had no online presence whatsoever. It didn’t help that this final branch of my paternity tree led me to the second most common last name in America. (Talk about irony!) It wasn’t until after another endless search, on some Ancestry page, that the obituary for my paternal grandfather finally came to the top, and in that obituary, my father’s name was listed. Twelve months of searching to find one word: a first name.
I dropped everything and emailed the school librarian who had found me the photos of my uncle and asked her to do another yearbook search. This time it would be for my real father. She was as excited as I was. It didn’t take her long to scan the photos.
When the photos came, I took a deep breath, already knowing what I was about to see. Yep. Well. His eyes are shaped like mine, I have his nose, now I know why I wore those thick coke-bottle glasses as a kid, (he had a pair also, in a sophomore year picture), and look at the way his 70s pageboy hair flips up, like mine does every day without trying. That is my father.
I beamed all this way to the age of 43 years old to learn the most hilarious and the most obvious ‘duh’ of all time:
He was a musician and a career academic. And I was an alien no more.