I found out 6 months ago that my dad isn’t my dad and my sperm donor made over 100 babies.
I took an Ancestry DNA test not expecting this whatsoever. I went into it thinking my dad was my dad, sometimes people just don’t look like one parent.
Short reason I took the test: I was curious to see if there was an ethnicity I wouldn’t expect in my DNA. The long reason has to do with the intersection between reincarnation and ancestor spirituality.
It actually all started about a year ago when I realized via tarot that in my past life I was my grandma’s boyfriend who died in Pearl Harbor. An astrologer with a specialty in past life readings confirmed that for me in a mind-blowing way. He then told me about a past life where I was Dutch. Then a separate psychic I’m social media friends with told me that I had Dutch and French ancestors. All my life I just thought I was Irish with a little English and German, and I knew that people tend to reincarnate within the same culture and/or family, so I wanted to confirm via DNA if I had this ancestry.
I got a lot more than I bargained for.
December 30, 2024, I got my results at about 9:30am. Before it lets you see your results, it shows you a disclaimer going “Some people are very surprised by their results! You can’t sue us about it!” And I went “yeah yeah whatever.”
“Who the fuck is Bruce?!”
I was the only adult in the house, watching my 2 year old twins. I sent my best friend a voice message bc I needed to talk this out with my voice and she was the only person I trusted in that moment. I didn’t trust my husband to understand. I told her something like “I got my DNA results, you know it’s the usual, Irish, German, whatever, but it matched with this man named Bruce and it’s SAYING HE’S MY FATHER!”
Among Donor Conceived People, the next few steps are extremely common. Denial: “this has to be a mistake.” Anger: “did my mom cheat on my dad?!” Bargaining: “I’ll message all these people I matched with that it’s saying are either my half siblings or aunts and uncles, and surely they will explain wtf is going on here.”
The first person to message me back said “here’s my number, call me, I’ll explain everything.”
It was about 10am now. He was in the car with his wife on speakerphone. He knew things about me before I said them, and he explained that Bruce was a sperm donor, the doctors told our parents to never tell us, there had been full anonymity, he had donated for about 16 years and there were a lot of us.
“I’ve fucking SEEN ALL THESE DOCUMENTARIES!” I said. Yelled? It felt like yelling in my head, but I was shaking so much I might have barely squeaked it out.
My new brother’s wife added “And Bruce isn’t a creep, by the way! He’s a really nice guy!”
After we got off the phone, he invited me to our sibling WhatsApp group, Facebook group with our siblings, Bruce, Bruce’s wife, and one of the sons Bruce raised before he started donating. He also sent me a Google doc with information on Bruce each sibling.
So within an hour of getting my DNA results, I had a new dad, 30-something new siblings, and an onboarding packet.
I say 30-something, that’s just the number that have been found out of more than 100 that Bruce sorta knows he made. He wasn’t supposed to know anything about the parents or babies, but he somehow got nurses at the clinics he donated at to illicitly tell him when he “landed one.” He lost count around 80. He feels certain it’s over 100. One of our siblings grilled him on his donation schedule and estimates the number could be as high as 220.
There’s also a problem with the fact that my mom never went to a clinic. She was inseminated by the same OBGYN who eventually delivered me, at the same hospital that Bruce himself was born in. I don’t think he knew that his donations travelled like that.
The day I found out, I just let myself spin out. I didn’t try to approach my mom. I needed the dust to settle a little. My husband begged me to wait until we didn’t live with her anymore, he was scared she would have such an outsized reaction as to kick us all out of her house, but we had no timeline on moving out, and I knew if I didn’t ask somewhat soon, I would explode.
The day after I found out, I waited for my mom to sit down to lunch. Made sure she had at least a few bites in so she wouldn’t be hangry AND blindsided.
Except she couldn’t be blindsided. She had put the DNA test in the mail for me. She had tried to talk me out of taking it at all. I thought she was just taking it as a personal affront to her genealogy skills.
She had 6 weeks to decide how she wanted to handle this conversation. And the tactic she apparently decided on was to act like it was boring and casual. Like I was talking about the weather.
“Does Dad know about the fertility clinic?” “What fertility clinic?” “The one you apparently went to?” “Oh, that. Of course.” She shrugged.
It was like pulling teeth, but I learned that he’d had a vasectomy during his first marriage, Mom was his 2nd wife.
“I told him it was a baby or nothing,” she said in a tone that told me she thought she was very clever. I also learned that Dad requested the guy be Irish, which Bruce is not. Or, he is a little tiny bit, but if you had asked him in 1987 when I was conceived, he would have said “No, I’m German.”
I didn’t find out that Mom never went to a clinic until one of my brothers came to our house to meet me and she dominated the conversation.
She was friendly and interested in him because she couldn’t escape him, but whenever I try to talk about my biological family, she’s very clipped. She doesn’t wanna hear about it. The other day she went “Aw, you were born at the same hospital, how sweet,” in a very mocking, seething tone when I was talking about Bruce, after I’d come home from having coffee with one of my brothers. She has never asked how I feel about the situation, never will.
It took me a month to figure out how to approach my dad about it. He’s a very emotionally repressed, very conservative Irish Catholic. I decided an email would allow him space to deal with his emotions in private, which is what he would want. I told him everything, told him how much more respect I had for him, tried to frame everything as positively and lovingly as possible.
The day after I sent the email, he came into my room and told me he wasn’t happy I found out at all, everything was great as far as he was concerned (it was not great), and he wasn’t happy about sharing. Like I’m a fuckin pizza.
I never really bonded with my dad, he doesn’t talk to me even though we’ve lived in the same house my whole life, so I don’t even know what he thinks he’s “sharing.” 🤮
He and I started emailing back and forth. I get my passion for writing from him, as do a lot of my siblings. I also inherit his interest in spirituality and “alternative states of consciousness,” as he put it. Most of us also inherited his wanderlust, which he himself inherited from several generations of pioneers, missionaries, and other intrepid travelers.
He sent me his grandmother’s memoirs. She was one of the first women to graduate UCSF back in 1896, and took her MD straight to India, where she met her husband, a missionary, and had a bunch of her 7 children. Her daughter also met her husband in India, he was from New York but he worked for a tire company and went where the rubber was.
To think, I had no idea about any of this when I moved to Morocco to be with my Moroccan husband.
Unlike my parents, Bruce has asked me about my feelings and tried to get to know me. Despite all the kids he has, he gives everyone as much attention as we want.
That means he also respects it if we don’t want to be involved. There are a few siblings in denial, and we leave them alone.
The siblings that are in contact are awesome. I adore them. I’ve met 3 brothers and one sister, all live in California. Most of us were born in California, but most have moved around. Wanderlust.
It’s surreal meeting a stranger who looks like you and has the same sense of humor as you. The other day I noticed my brother and I both rub our eyes a lot, a similar mannerism. My sister was the first person I’ve ever met who also didn’t understand why everyone was freaking out about lockdowns in 2020. I told her “Finally! Someone who gets it!”
She’s also into psychics, and one had just told her that she had some kind of connection to Canada, and was spooked when I mentioned our great-grandfather was Canadian. She didn’t know.
Which brings me back around to my grandma’s boyfriend who died in Pearl Harbor.
The same astrologer who confirmed that for me was thrilled to get a birth time for a sperm donor.
And he was able to tell me that Bruce also died in Pearl Harbor in his last life.
