I wonder what my mother was thinking that Christmas eight years ago when she had us all spit our DNA into vials and put them in the mail. Maybe she thought 23andMe was just a fun gimmick, another way to generate an internet profile — in my case, the top three results were 83.9 percent British and Irish, 10.2 percent French and German and 3 percent broadly northwestern European. Did she have any idea that this was how I would finally learn her secret?
Five years later, I was on my way to meet a stranger named Shane at a restaurant in midtown Manhattan. To help me recognize him, he had texted: “Khaki pants. Striped shirt. Sitting at the bar.”
His message made me laugh, so dorky and efficient. Didn’t he know that I had already Googled him? Zoomed in on his features? Scrutinized him for characteristics that he shared with my mother, who was also his mother?
My parents never bothered to make an account on the 23andMe website, which allows you to connect with DNA relatives and send and receive messages. I made one out of curiosity, not expecting much.
Over the next few years, I heard from distant cousins in Georgia or Alabama, people I imagined I had little in common with. I had left the South when I was 18 for college in California. In 2020, I moved to Brooklyn. I wasn’t much interested in genealogy or our family’s history.
I assumed Shane’s message would be no different from the rest, so I let it sit unread in my inbox for a few weeks.
When I did open it, I saw that the website listed us as a possible match for maternal half-siblings. He told me that he was born in Miami in 1970 and that someone had given him the 23andMe kit as a gift.
He was curious to learn more about his biological family. His profile said he lived in Greenville, S.C., just a few hours from where I grew up and where my parents now live. On Instagram, he looked just like my mother — same eyebrows, broad smile, prominent cheekbones. More than that, there was a quality to his face that I recognized as also belonging to her, a guilelessness that doubled as a sort of frank intensity.
He was definitely my mother’s son.
I don’t know exactly what I did next, but I know what I didn’t do. I didn’t go wake up my girlfriend, Katie, who was asleep in the other room, and tell her that I had just discovered my half brother. I didn’t draft a text message or an email to my mother or plan to call her. I didn’t reply to Shane’s message. I wanted nothing to do with this.
I felt like I had learned a secret that I wasn’t supposed to know. I feared entering some inviolable space that existed between my mother and me. We were close, but our conversations were mostly superficial. I had perfected a tone for when I spoke to her about my life, a phoned-in balance of optimism and circumspection — my job at the wine store was good, but I was going to ask for a raise or look for a better job somewhere else. No big news to share, just another day in my life.
When I was a teenager, my mother and I had a fraught relationship. She reacted to certain things in ways that I couldn’t understand, and it would make me angry. She was intensely protective. An explicit song on the radio could send her into a panic over what I was listening to. She closely monitored my internet use.
Once, driving home from school, she gave me a lecture on sexual health, complete with print outs of studies around alcohol use and teen pregnancy. I was 14, chubby and awkward, and the idea of having sex with anybody was a distant and terrifying prospect.
Growing up in deep-red South Carolina, I had seen her storm out of dinner parties when men expressed ambiguous feelings about women’s access to reproductive health care. I knew that she had worked at a women’s health clinic in Atlanta. Her convictions about a woman’s right to control her own body didn’t need much explaining.
Still, from time to time, I could sense something left unsaid, some profound context lingering behind the quick temper, the palpable fury, the moistened eyes. Something almost begging to be shared, to be said aloud. Learning about Shane was like finding a missing puzzle piece. It made so much sense. But I wasn’t supposed to know, and I didn’t want to ask her about it.
“You have to call her,” Katie said. “Like, right now.” We were having breakfast in our narrow kitchen. I had finally told her about Shane.
“I can’t,” I said. Our dog was sniffing under the table, waiting for bits of granola to fall. “What if my dad doesn’t know? What if she denies it? What then?”
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this sooner,” she said. “I would be freaking out. I am freaking out. I’m desperate to know what happened. Aren’t you?”
“I just have to wait until the right time,” I said.
Of course, there was never going to be a right time. After several more months of ignoring the issue, it became clear that I had to call my mother. It had gotten to the point where I was talking about Shane’s message with strangers at parties.
I went for a walk in our neighborhood. It was autumn, the time of year when people bundle up and retreat into themselves, when the red-gold afternoon light turns every feeling into something like a potent cliché.
When I reached the park, I called.
“Hello, son,” she said, her typical, cheerful greeting.
“I have to ask you about something kind of crazy,” I said.
“What?” she said.
I told her about Shane’s message.
“Wow,” she said. “That is crazy.”
“I know,” I said. “So, is he your son?”
I had expected surprise, but of course she wasn’t surprised at all. She sounded relieved. “I’ve always wondered when I would have to tell you about this,” she said. She had been carrying the burden of her secret, and the question of when to tell me, for as long as I had been alive.
My mother was 16 in the fall of 1969 when she became pregnant by her high school boyfriend. She lived in Florida then; Roe v. Wade was three years away. The preacher at her family’s church suggested that her parents send her to The Florence Crittenton Home for Women in Miami, a place for young women in need, including unwed mothers.
Their priority was keeping their daughter’s pregnancy a secret. After she returned home, they never spoke of it again.
My mother went to great lengths to give me a childhood that was different from hers. To shelter me in ways that she had not been, and to encourage me to engage in honest conversations about bodies, emotions and choices. It would have been a terrible irony if, after discovering Shane’s existence, I had continued to stay quiet. I would have been perpetuating the silence that had characterized her own upbringing.
And I would have cheated my mother out of the chance to connect with the son whom she cut ties with at birth and to begin to fill in the missing pieces of their lives, something for which they both have been grateful.
It’s an odd impulse, the desire to hide our true selves from the people who know us most intimately. My mother’s secret was hers to tell or to withhold. Her pregnancy was her story, not mine. But to have the type of relationship she has always wanted to have with me, one built on trust and openness, it was necessary for me to learn the truth.
I wonder: Had I known about Shane when I was younger, would I have been more understanding of my mother’s intensity? Her sense of outrage? Recently, she told me she was afraid I would have judged her. Who knows, really, what I was capable of understanding when I was a child or a teenager. But as an adult, learning about what my mother went through when she was 16 and carried with her for the rest of her life, I have come to admire her more than ever.
A block away from the midtown restaurant where Shane and I had agreed to meet, I replied to his text and told him that I would be there soon.
As I walked in, Shane waved me over to the bar. Standing face to face for the first time, he went for a handshake, but I gave him a hug.
He explained that he was in the city for work. “The airline lost my luggage,” he said, “so I had to go to Macy’s to get some clothes.”
Khaki pants. Striped shirt. And our mother’s eyes.
Cole Huey is a writer in New York City.
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