DNA doula

this would have been so different without her

I haven’t told you about someone I’ll call MD. She is a hero in this story.

She is that friend who says just the right thing, who gives you treats you didn’t know you wanted, who helps you see the best in yourself.

The simplest way to describe her role in all this is to say that I was with her when I realized I was donor conceived and narrowed down who my DNA father was.

She’d contacted me a few years ago on 23 and Me, saying that we were first cousins, and this was just one of the many messages from many people that I’d not seen or had ignored over the years. I think a year or so after her message I noticed it again and replied with some of my ancestors’ last names and birth countries. None of it lined up with hers.

There are a lot of delayed and confused exchanges like this on both Ancestry and 23 and Me, none of them initiated by me until earlier this year. Now, of course, they all make sense.

Anyway—it was with MD that things eventually became clearer, or harder to ignore.

She messaged me on FB, and said she added me as a friend, and a cousin. I felt warmly about her/the invite, even though I didn’t yet understand how we were related.

We chatted more, trying to put things together—it was quickly clear that one of my paternal great grandparents was one of her grandparents, but I didn’t know who, and the fact that she was not Ashkenazi was confusing since my whole paternal side is.

She was (is) so welcoming and comfortable and we decided to Zoom so we could compare genealogy charts. (Her first 23 and Me message said “I would like to figure out our connection. Thanks for considering.”)

Our conversation was great, and I knew at some point that it was significant, or soon would be. I remember I was sitting at our dining table, the window behind me, I was facing west, and I’d just taken a shower so had wet hair. I remember details so vividly when things turn out to be important.

She is beautiful in that natural, healthy way. She’s nonjudgmental—I say this without having met her, but by now I know to trust myself.

This was before everything spun into a tornado and was so fast and so slow at once. She may have realized the truth long before me, or maybe we kind of circled around it together. I wonder if it’s the former, though, because she was so gentle with me. In one message, after our Zoom, while going back and forth with names, she wrote, in response to me saying I knew the DNA father was one of two brothers Do you feel like this is getting too close for comfort?

I knew that she wasn’t warning me away from anything. I feel certain that it was a warm, maternal instinct, a way of saying “Hey, this is a lot. Take a break when and if and how you need to.”

I could be making this up, but as I said, I’ve learned I can trust myself.

She reminds me a lot of my friend PA (some of my local friends will know who this is)—a support person of all kinds—bodyworker, doula, empath. She was there for both my children’s births, and her calm presence is profoundly healing. I have always felt safe around her; my body knew it didn’t need to be so guarded.

Anyway—I think of MD as the doula of my DNA experience. Not only was she with me during the discovery, but she supported me as I made decisions about when/if/how to contact the donor. She told me he was a very good man, that she was sure he’d want to know me in some way, and gave me the courage to reach out, and to keep my hopes up when I didn’t hear back right away.

She has great admiration for her uncle, my donor, and in welcoming me to their family, I felt like I belonged in some way.

Mostly it was this—through our conversations, I felt like I was allowed to exist in this other family, however that may evolve.

When conversations with my donor began, I told him about MD, and that if he and I had never connected, she agreed to be the “keeper of the story” on his side of the family—she knew the whole of it, and at the very least, it was out there to be known. He said I’d made a very good choice about who I chose as the keeper.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart, MD.