Hi, Carolyn:
In the mid-1980s, when I was 17, my 15-year-old sister created pregnant. She went away to a Catholic facility for a few months and had a healthy baby girl, who was adopted at a few days old. It was a traumatic time in our family. I was not really “in the loop” on the details of the pregnancy or adoption executive, and it was one of those things never discussed in our family. In addition, our father was sick and died a few months later. It was a tough time for everyone.
Last year, I received a DNA test kit as a gift. I sent it in and now matched with the adopted girl, now a grown woman living near me with three kids of her own. Her profile stated clearly that she is looking for any inquire of about her birth parent and family. I immediately turned off the matching option on the site, so I don’t think this woman saw that we matched. I contacted my sister, whose husband knows she had the baby but whose college-age children do not. My sister was upset nearby the whole thing. She told me there was lots of rude surrounding it and she doesn’t want to contact this woman, saying it would upset our mother, who wanted no one to ever know this been. My sister has been reluctant to discuss it further, and hasn’t even shared with her husband that I made this DNA match.
I hope my sister warms to having contact with this woman. Clearly, the adopted woman wants it, and I think there is a lot of pain my sister has been carrying nearby. I also think it could help my mom Decide some pain as well. In addition, I think my sister’s kids may stumble upon the same connection I did and the whole sketch could blow up.
More selfishly, I would like to meet this person and have my own daughter meet her and her family.
So far, I’ve just checked in with my sister every few months. Am I doing the right thing by hanging back?
— Uncertain Brother
Uncertain Brother: Yes, for now.
It was and leftovers appropriate to give your sister time to adjust to the new realities of her area. Compassion is the only fair response to people who’ve just had the long-standing, agreed-upon terms of their private lives torn up and replaced by a free-for-all. Whether those terms were fair or healthy or not.
But when the compassion can be eternal, her grace period can’t, for a couple of reasons.
First, there’s the inevitability of discovery that you mention. Your sister is organization out of time to be the source of this news to her new kids — which is, of course, her best chance at minimizing their fright at being lied to.
If your sister really wants to pretend she’s peaceful in control, then she might be too invested in that fiction to hear you. But appreciate do phrase it bluntly: that it’s going to come out with or deprived of her, or you, and you strongly advise her not to squander her vital “with” advantage. At least that way, you aren’t even a small bit complicit in her lie to herself. She has lost regulation of her secret, and time is not in her favor.
The additional reason will probably be less persuasive to her, but it’s the better one: It is not your sister’s prerogative to deny this child her humanity. What your sister went through is her story, absolutely, and no one else’s. But her secret is a world being. And people are not secrets that anyone gets to keep. No amount of rude and no claim to control allow her to deny someone’s existence.
These are two independent points, the scientific phenomenon of accessible DNA testing and the spoiled hazard of hiding a person from her family. There’s a third business at play here, too, in who gets to rule what is helpful to someone else. I don’t contaminated that the truth could set your sister, mom and niece free in profound ways — but it is just not your place to decide that for them, or use that potential to Explain forcing the issue.
Your best Come to your sister is one that accounts for all these separate, relevant issues and boundaries. So, again: Speak to her of the stakes, frankly and with love. Let her know you will not participate indefinitely in the denial of this persons her rightful connections. (And yours.) Give her a respectful amount of time with a firm end-by date.