by Dani Shapiro
I started to tell Rothman about my own recent discovery. It was hard to keep his attention, but eventually I did manage to stutter out the story. He looked distressed when I got to the part about finding Ben. Unsurprisingly, he and many other directors of sperm banks believe that doing away with anonymity would destroy the industry. And this may be true. If Ben had known, as a young medical student, that his identity might someday be found out, he would never have done it. I would not exist.
“What about disclosure?” I asked him. “Do you counsel parents to tell their children about their origins?”
He shrugged. “That’s up to them, really. We don’t get involved. I don’t see what difference it makes.”
“It can be very traumatic,” I said. “To not know. And then to find out.”
I was starting to get emotional. All those metal cylinders containing tiny vials, each vial filled with a staggering number of frozen sperm. When we had walked through the facility earlier, I had noticed shipping containers with metal canisters filled with liquid nitrogen, capped with bright yellow stickers: DO NOT RETURN EMPTY VIALS. The frozen sperm of donors like Le Artist and Coach of the Year were carefully packed into reinforced corrugated cardboard and loaded onto FedEx trucks or into the cargo holds of airplanes, heading god knows where. Millions. Millions of souls.
“Why is it traumatic?” Rothman looked puzzled. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
I had heard this logic before. Would I have preferred not to have been born? Of course not. I was grateful for my life. Grateful that Ben Walden had a free hour on the day of my conception. Grateful for the potent combination of my parents’ courage and despair, even for their capacity to put those blinders on. But gratitude and trauma weren’t mutually exclusive.
I spoke slowly. “It’s traumatic because I’m fifty-four years old and I found out that the father I adored, the father who raised me, was not my biological father. That the family I thought I came from is not my biological family. That my ancestors are not my biological ancestors.”
Rothman sat back in his chair and assessed me. A look of genuine compassion flitted across his face.
“I can see how that would be difficult,” he said, and then he brightened. “But you look fantastic for fifty-four,” he said. “You got good genes.”
* * *
—
The intrauterine inseminations, the hormones, the catalogs of shiny young women that Michael and I had perused, the meetings with doctors, therapists, professionals, more than one cross-country trip, all took place in an increasingly frantic blur. Each step led us deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole in which the moves were choreographed to appear logical and sane. And they were logical for many people. But not for us. I sleepwalked through that time as if some buried part of me knew that I was in familiar territory. History on repeat. What vestiges, scraps of dialogue, exchanged glances, closed doors, harsh whispers clung to me over the years, had me feeling—as we tried for a second child, as a child became a goal—as if I had stepped into the rehearsal of a play whose lines I already knew by heart?
We walked away, in the end. We decided that our little family of three was exactly the right number for us—that Jacob’s life as an only child would be happier than mine. It might have been different, had we had no children—had we been determined to become parents at any cost. But it was a sense I had that this path was dangerous for me. I didn’t understand why. But something told me that we might just be ruining our lives. Misery, heartache, denial, secrets, grief were all tied up in it. All I knew was that I felt suffocated, paralyzed, by choices I couldn’t bring myself to make, and a future I couldn’t fathom.
* * *
—
I wasn’t thinking about our own brief, frenzied foray into the realm of assisted reproduction on the day I discovered my father wasn’t my father. Nor when I first recalled my mother’s precise words on the Saw Mill River Parkway, followed by Susie’s suggestion that I delve deeper. I at first drew no parallels between my parents’ experience and my own when I realized I was donor-conceived and the tumblers all spun open and I found Ben.
It is a measure of true adulthood that we are able to imagine our parents as the people they may have been before us. My mother: not yet the full-blown narcissist borderline with the raging temper. My father: not yet the fragile man consumed by his own sorrow. But the two of them—young, vibrant, still in love with each other, wishing, hoping, praying for a life that would offer them a family, recompense for their struggles. As time went on and my shock began to dissipate, I was able to reach back into the world before me and picture them: flawed, optimistic, subscribing to the theories of the day, giving themselves over to the perceived wisdom of others.
Not long after I met Ben, I found an unopened box of my mother’s buried in our basement, containing notes and cards from my birth. Among them, a telegram from a rabbi in Israel addressed to my grandparents, congratulating them on the great mitzvah of the arrival of their tenth grandchild. At the very bottom of the box was a small florist’s card written to my mother in my father’s hand:
Dearest darling,
It’s been long. It’s been hard. But like you always do, extra special.
All my love, Paul
43
One day, while cleaning out my desk drawers, I found a card Susie had written to Jacob on his bar mitzvah, four years earlier. Redeemable for the portrait of your great-grandfather Joseph Shapiro, the card read. Susie had inherited the portrait of our grandfather when Shirley moved to Chicago. It had been a sore point for me, though I had never said so. That portrait of our grandfather had hung over the fireplace in my grandparents’ apartment. In a family that prided itself on its portraits, this was the definitive portrait of the family patriarch: large, painterly, formidable. Our grandfather was stately in a dark gray three-piece suit, a hand resting on a book, his pince-nez balanced on the bridge of his nose. He looked like a man in control of his destiny. I held some sort of magical belief that being in possession of his portrait would mean I was also in control of mine.
I had wondered why Shirley had given the portrait to Susie and was secretly pleased, and surprised, that Susie planned to bequeath it to Jacob. I hoped Jacob would hang it in a future home—an heirloom, a relic of his heritage. But would the portrait still be redeemable, now that Joseph Shapiro was no longer Jacob’s great-grandfather? The question was at once piercing and irrelevant. I knew Jacob would have no interest—might never have had any interest—in this long-dead man, whether or not he was related to him. Regardless, it was still stunning that part of our lives was over, sealed like a time capsule containing grainy documentary footage, a yellowed tallis, silver, filigreed tallis clips, and framed photographs of the people I had once believed were ours.
Susie had fallen away from me again with astonishing ease, in fact with something like relief. Our lifetime of disconnection, finally explained. For a brief time after my initial discovery, we had several phone conversations in which we tried to parse out what our father may or may not have known. I asked Susie if she had always suspected I wasn’t our father’s child. Was that why she’d brought up the practice of confused artificial insemination, all those years ago? Indeed, she had suspected, she told me.
“Why?” I asked her.
“You just looked so…Christian,” she answered.
* * *
—
I turned my attention to my other half sister, not the distrusting one hovering on the periphery of my childhood but the one with whom I shared a blood tie. Ben and Pilar had given me permission—something I felt I needed in order to contact her. They had been warm and forthcoming, yet with each passing day, I touched on the sense that part of me would now and forever be a wanderer. A stranger in a strange land. The language of the Torah regularly rose up from a deep place within me as if stirred from the bottom of a giant cauldron. The Lord will scat
ter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth. Exile was a theme in which I was well schooled. Banishment and its aftermath were stitched into every biblical story I could think of. Even my Jacob’s Torah portion for his own bar mitzvah had been Bamidbar, a dreadfully boring passage in which God asks Moses to conduct a census of the twelve tribes of Israel who wander in the desert.
I had begun to call upon friends and acquaintances—rabbis, ministers, Buddhist monks, philosophers—to ask for guidance. I knew these remarkable people because I had written a spiritual memoir when Jacob was a little boy, as a way of reconciling my beliefs—or lack of beliefs—with my religious background. I was in a spiritual crisis at the time, but now it seemed as if I must have known that someday I would need to summon an army. Now, I was in a crisis of the soul. If I didn’t know how to locate myself—in the roots of my history, in the geography that had formed me—how was I supposed to make sense of the rest of my life?
A guru told me—with a certainty I couldn’t help but envy—that the dead do not feel pain. When we die, she said, we survey it all: the whole complex human catastrophe we’ve left behind. We see patterns and designs from the great distance of death, and understand our life’s purpose, after the fact. An expert in the philosophy of yoga pointed me to a book on karma. The director of a holistic institute promised me that when I got to the other side of my own searing pain, I would be set free. She suggested I stand in front of each portrait of the people I had believed to be my ancestors, and ask: Who are you to me?
Just before Hanukkah, I called David Ingber, a rabbi who had become a colleague and a friend. It had been six months since my wandering had commenced. After listening to my entire story, he quietly said: “You can say, ‘This is impossible, terrible.’ Or you can say, ‘This is beautiful, wonderful.’ You can imagine that you’re in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home.”
At the end of our conversation, I wished the rabbi a Happy Hanukkah.
“Happy Hanukkah,” he replied back. “And”—he laughed—“Merry Christmas!”
* * *
—
In the spirit of beautiful, wonderful possibilities, I wrote Emily Walden a note on her Facebook page and received an email back from her the following day. Her correspondence felt instantly familiar. How to explain it? Each of us—two women close in age, married a similar length of time, with children who were also close in age—curled up with our morning coffee once a month or so and wrote letters that grew longer with each exchange.
Here’s a photo I took on my morning walk. This is the view out my window.
Both of us, shy, strong, quiet, loyal, sensitive. Both of us, serious about our work, fierce about our kids, devoted to our long-lasting female friendships. I’m trying to be more intentional of late, to reconnect with the important people in my life. I’m home alone, a rare and savory occurrence. I had recently taken an online version of the Myers-Briggs personality test and discovered that I am an INFJ—introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging—a category that makes up less than one percent of the population. I had a feeling that Emily might also fall into that one percent. Which of our qualities could be understood as inherited? What had formed us?
She had grown up in Portland, daughter of Ben and Pilar—a physician and his immigrant wife. She was the oldest of three. She had gone to church with her parents every Sunday morning of her childhood. Photos of Emily showed a dark-haired, lanky, pretty little girl, a fresh-faced teenager at camp and on school field trips. Ben was right. We did look a lot alike, despite our very different coloring. On the opposite edge of the country, I had grown up the only child of Paul and Irene—an observant Jewish stockbroker and a former advertising executive turned unhappy homemaker. I had gone to synagogue with my dad every Saturday morning of my life. Similar photos existed of me: a gap-toothed, grinning girl, an awkward high school student wearing a crewneck sweater and corduroys. It was so strange, now, to contemplate our different worlds—and yet the profound, intimate genetic link of having the same father.
Just as I’d thought about Ben, I considered the many ways my path might have crossed with Emily’s over the years. It seemed Emily and I might easily have friends and experiences in common. In time, we will discover that we have followed the work of the same meditation teacher, and that Emily has friends who have been to Hedgebrook, a women-only writers’ retreat in the Pacific Northwest where I’ve taught master classes. The degrees of separation between us were few. We may have been in audiences together, at literary readings, or meditation talks. We might have attended the same parties; despite our six-year age difference, we attended graduate school at the same time. Ferries, trains, buses, planes—millions of souls—brushing up against one another, knowing nothing.
But then there were other ways in which Emily and I were products of our different universes. Those YouTube videos I had watched in the tense weeks waiting to hear whether Ben was willing to meet me depicted a big, boisterous family celebrating Christmas. One Saturday morning, I awoke to a long note from Emily in which she included a photograph she’d taken of a recipe card, stained brown from use.
Alice Walden (our biological grandmother) was an amazing woman. She never went to college, as she cared for her ill mother. But she was really bright and articulate—my dad says she used to read the dictionary for fun. I’ve attached a recipe of hers for you.
I stared at the handwriting for a few moments, studying it. Alice Walden. Ben’s mother. Emily’s grandmother. My grandmother, technically speaking. Was it my imagination or was there something familiar in the way Alice Walden shaped her letters? Could there be anything genetic to be understood about the way handwriting evolves over generations? It seemed possible. Then I turned my attention to the recipe itself, which was for something called Twenty-four-Hour Lettuce Salad.
The instructions were to pat a broken-up head of lettuce into the bottom of a casserole dish, preferably a pretty glass one, then add celery, green onions, peppers, and water chestnuts over the lettuce, cover with an entire cup of mayonnaise, sprinkle with sugar, cheese, salad seasoning, and refrigerate for twenty-four hours, adding bacon bits just before serving.
If I had been tasked to invent the most goyishe recipe imaginable, I don’t think I could have come up with anything to improve upon it. The cheese and bacon bits—mixing dairy with meat, bacon no less—were about as treyf as a meal could get, in the Yiddish idiom of my childhood. Not to mention the very idea of a salad casserole, refrigerated overnight. While the Waldens were dining on their grandmother’s Twenty-four-Hour Lettuce Salad, in the home of my childhood we were eating chicken soup with matzo balls, meat-filled kreplach, gefilte fish topped with bright red horseradish sauce.
Emily’s hymns. My Shabbos prayers. Her Christmas tree and tinsel and caroling. My family’s silver menorah—the one I use to this day—candles blazing each Hanukkah in the bay window of my childhood home. The large, contented, peopled world in which she was raised. The small, confusing, solitary world that I escaped from. Her father—our father, yet in so many ways not my father—with his pink cheeks and thoughtful, kind demeanor. My father—the one whose voice I will hear for the rest of my life—singing the Birkat Hamazon, the grace after meals. If I close my eyes now, I can bring him back to me. Shir hama-a lot beshuv Adonai, et shivat Tzion, hayinu k’cholmim. Az yimalei s’chok pinu, u’lshoneinu rinah. His voice is off-key, plaintive, beseeching, and when our eyes meet across the dining table, he smiles at me and reaches over to pat my hand. A song of ascents. When the Lord will return the exiles of Zion, we will have been like dreamers. Then our mouths will be filled with laughter, and our tongues with songs of joy.
* * *
—
Emily and I continued our slow, long cross-country volley, increasingly sharing details of our lives. Our sons were both looking at colleges. Each of them was musical, and particularly good at math. Our
kids had taken part in marches and protests in reaction against the recent presidential election. We were both consumed with and disturbed by the news. I found Emily to be enormously empathic as I shared more of my story with her, and any caution she may have felt began to fall away. We started to make a plan to get together in late spring, when I would be stopping in Portland on my book tour. Hope and curiosity was how she described her feelings toward me. Those words described how I felt as well.
One afternoon I opened an email from her that included a passage from the work of Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist teacher and writer whom I had long admired. “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”
I had felt every day since the previous June that I now lived—exiled, forever wandering—in no-man’s-land. But the truth was that this had always been the case. Any thought of solid ground was nothing more than an illusion—not only for me but for all of us. Those words: Completely awake. Live fully, sent to me by the half sister I had never known. I had strived for those states of being all my life, while a part of me slumbered. We will have been like dreamers. Now there would be no more slumber. You will be set free.
44
As I continued to correspond with both Ben and Emily, I tried to loosen my own reins on the very notion of certainty. It was no longer a desirable state, especially since I had spent my whole life being so certain and so wrong. Instead, I tried to ride each new wave like a surfer: fluid, balanced, focused, come what may. Over the holidays, I made batches of Christmas cookies. Why Christmas cookies? It was very nearly a joke, but it was also a kind of permission. Merry Christmas, David Ingber had said. I liked Christmas cookies. Why couldn’t I bake them? I sprinkled gingerbread men and wreaths with red and green, allowed them to harden, and placed them in a jar on our kitchen counter. We lit Hanukkah candles each night, and Jacob and I chanted the brachot. Genetically speaking I was half Ashkenazi Jewish, half Anglo-Saxon Presbyterian. My ancestors, scattered far and wide. There could be confusion in that—or liberation. The choice was mine.
