What started at age 18 was confirmed at age 55 thanks to 23&Me…..

When something known in the gut is finally confirmed to the mind, time stands still and the scene becomes burned into cellular memory.

I was 18 and my life had been difficult and not of my own making. My father won custody of me at age 12 due to my mom’s advanced alcoholism. He remarried when I was 14 and she was an alcoholic too with a meanness that my best friend defined as the closest she’d ever been to pure evil. My stepmother had been a local TV weather person. Her status matched my dad’s escalating corporate success and seemed to excuse her total disregard for others’ feelings. I spent my last 4 years at home just trying to fly under the radar and avoid her verbal attacks.

My teenage rebellion was to get involved in a religion other than my dad’s. He was a strict Catholic. So my religious exploration was as disturbing to him as my 3 older brothers’ forays into booze, drugs and jail. But, even though I tried to explain that it had nothing to do with him, he still took it as a personal affront. I became, to his business genius, another problem to be solved. But the reality was that this group and its members gave me the kindness and inclusion that was NEVER available at home. And the nastier things got at home, the more I gravitated to this religious group….simple and quite predictable really.

One afternoon another fight was brewing. The tension was palpable. I don’t remember what the final trigger was. But I remember my 4’11” self being about 5 feet from my 6’3” dad and I remember him screaming “After everything I’ve done for you!”

Well, given all the verbal abuse he’d allowed to be aimed at me from my stepmother, I wasn’t feeling any amount of gratitude. I shamelessly pilfered Sidney Portier’s line from the movie GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER and I reminded him that whatever he’d done for me he was supposed to do as my father!

And that’s when my head finally caught up to my gut. His retort was:

“Oh really? Ask your mom about that.”

When I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, he said:

“Your mom says there’s no relationship between thee and me!” And he walked outside and started working in the yard.

Time stopped and so many pieces fell into place. I had a flash of playing with my friend Paula in 3rd grade. Our favorite game was about being “adopted”. Another flash slammed into my brain. I was about 4 years old and playing with my dolls under the kitchen table. I remembered my dad saying to my mom that nothing about me looked like him. I FELT the implication but didn’t understand it. Eighteen years of feeling like an alien in my family finally made sense. And that cellular memory / awakening will always be with me.

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