I've been tired

of thinking about all this

And so now this song is in my head. Don’t click on the link if you don’t like loud music or yelling (or if you don’t want to see or hear Pixies without Kim Deal. I get it.)

I came back from our trip feeling what I guess one is supposed to feel after a vacation—renewed, restored, re-whatevered. Rejiggered? Do you have to first be jiggered? How do you know if you are or are not jiggered?

One result is that my intensity around being donor conceived and having that information kept from me my whole life has become…less intense.

I think it’s possibly the perspective our vacation gave me—literally, given that I haven’t been really far away in decades, since I was in my early 20s. I wasn’t on the computer, I wasn’t wondering what donor dude was doing or where he was. (He gave me a vague outline of his spring/summer travels and I’d been tracking it a bit out of habit—always imaging where he is, what he’s doing.) Same with half-bro. Our communications have become infrequent—though I notice that I say that, and then they pick up again. He’s easy to entice into texting—a chatty fellow, who, like most people, can’t resist answering questions about themselves if it’s a part of them they like.

But I’ve slacked on my weekly or biweekly or bimonthly (what is every two weeks? bimonthly? biweekly?) enticements. I’m sort of tired of it. Last year at this time, when he’d just found out about me and we engaged in a flurry of getting to know you emails and then texts, it seemed the natural progression would be to meet in person, or at least Zoom.

We kind of stalled out there. I mean he did. It’s been increasingly clear that donor dude will stay donor dude and I will not likely meet him unless circumstances make it harder to avoid than not. (Maybe I’m visiting half bro and they have plans that weekend and…yeah, I clearly still daydream. They do see each other a ton. Half bro sent me Father’s Day photos of the whole family, including his daughters, my nieces, who came into town for the weekend.)

I’m also tired of being angry at my mom. She somehow rationalized not telling me something fairly significant. I don’t fault my dad for this as much, which I’ve written about earlier. I know what it’s like to be in a relationship with my mom, and he’s quite passive. She’s healthier than most people, but of course is getting older. I do want to have a relationship with her.

Week after week my very patient therapist says some version of this: Your mother is your mother. She is the same mother you’ve always had.

It’s not a judgment or explanation. It’s one of things good therapists or wise people say, over and over in different ways, until you can hear it or understand it, even if only halfway. I think I’m at the halfway mark.

I had to miss a week of therapy because I fucked up my back (a recurrence of The Great Back Fuckup of Summer 2022) and couldn’t really move. When I returned this week, I told her the various conversations I’d engaged my mom in—all things we’d gone over in therapy, playing them out, me realizing I wouldn’t get the thing I was looking for. Every week I leave resolved not to do those things. Then I had a week off and was like eh, fuck it.

Not that it was my plan to engage or provoke my mom. I just asked a couple questions I’ve been wanting to ask, that seem reasonable to me—until my therapist patiently engages and carefully provokes me, her patient. (Pun intentional.)

One question is—Are you relieved that I know?

For a long time I wanted her to understand how hard this has been for me. I’ve accepted that it’s not possible for her to understand this. It might be intolerable. I might not be able to tolerate my children’s pain if I were part of the cause. (Though I think, hope, believe that I could at least do my very best. It’s one of the benefits of being in therapy for a million years and one of the reasons I keep going.)

But my latest quest is to find out if she feels the relief that my dad does. Right away he talked about us going forward with a relationship built on honesty. And since he says he thought it was 50/50 whether I was his bio kid or not, he had more skin in the DNA reveal, and a revelation in the same world as mine. Maybe it was hard for him. But he said he’s relieved. We are both relieved that I don’t feel any differently about him, or even think of him differently.

So, unwisely, on my week off therapy, I asked her. I felt it was in the spirit of healing. Like, okay, you don’t get that this was really hard for me and you feel victimized and beat up. So let’s try to connect. Let me try to engage you, but also provoke you. I include the latter verb because it’s clear to me that if I don’t get directly angry with someone I’m angry with, I’m inevitably passive aggressive. Sometimes I hide it better than others.

I never got to the provocation phase because her answer was, surprisingly, no. She was not relieved. Should I have been surprised? Not sure.

She reiterated how horrible this last year and a half has been for her, how awful, and how she is not relieved that any of this happened.

I tried, as I do—often to the annoyance of loved ones and colleagues—to rephrase my question. Okay, you’re upset about how things have been since I found out—but, given that I would inevitably find out, are you in some part just relieved because the tension of when and how I’d find out is gone? Still no. I guess she didn’t think I’d find out—or at least that it was possible I wouldn’t.

I can see how having something buried that deep, rationalized in a sound way based on sound advice from so long ago, stays put. I don’t think she’s updated her relationship to the story of my conception over the years, even as she submitted her DNA to 23 and Me and checked out Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance from the library.

It is still strange, given her career as a therapist, spending most of her days listening to people talk about their inner lives and secrets and fears, that she had no awareness of her own secrets and fears (about me finding out.) I mean my dad, who is not the most introspective or psychologically inclined person, had thoughts and fears and questions over the years.

So now I’m just tired again. And maybe wanting to let things go with my mom in some way. Just chat. Get to know her more, accept that her construction of my life is how it is, and go from there.

Also, I’m working on accepting that I won’t meet donor dude. I probably will meet half bro, but my scheme to just happen to be in his neck of the woods is losing steam. Which is probably good. I still do want to claim membership in that family, but am working on letting that go, too. Appreciating the family I do have, the three people who live with me in the house that I love, and my amazing community of friends stretching way back to my days in Catholic school (oh hi M-L!!)

These people are everything. Thank you, thank you, thank you.