In a more traditional family setting, most of the time you and your siblings have two parents, and you all have a general idea of where your family comes from. I'm happy for you if that is your case, but for people like me, it's not exactly that easy to pinpoint.
I come from a home of a single mother with four kids, but even though we were kept away from who I believed was my father, I never really had an interest or need to "discover" who I was.
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My mom was from Colombia and so was my dad (even though I was born in New York, I was Colombian - end of story). I always identified as a Colombian because of my family, and I fully understood that Colombia has a large mix of people who immigrated there from all over the world. But I never quite knew the differences between me and my immediate family.
Looking back in old family albums, I saw my great grandparents, great aunts, and uncles. Some of them were tall, with pale skin, blue eyes, blonde hair, and freckles, while others were darker-toned and looked Afro-Latino. When I looked at my mother and my three other siblings, though we all looked like each other, there was still a striking difference between me and them.
My mom, older sister, and two younger brothers all have olive skin, curly or very wavy hair and are all under 5'6". I, on the other hand, am fairer than my siblings (though still olive-toned) and I have slightly wavy hair and tower over my family at a whopping 5'10". So, yeah, it was a little odd, but I always figured I was different from them because I just got the weird end of the gene pool.
That went on until I was about 14 or 15 and my mom finally decided to let me in on a little secret - the secret being that I had a different father from the rest of my siblings.
After I was done jumping up and down from the sheer joy of having no blood relation to my mom's ex-husband, I started to revel in the fact that all of my differences from my siblings made so much more sense now.
The only explanation as to why I really was the oddball out of my siblings was because I was, in fact, the oddball.
Having that information with me throughout the years has brought on a sense of relief and major awareness. I became very aware that I really didn't know who I was. I mean, of course, I knew who I was from a philosophical standpoint, but there was a whole other half to my blood that was foreign to me.
For the next few years, I would stare at myself and begin to question things about my physical self. Most kids can look at themselves in the mirror and point out which bits of their face or body they got from their parents. Like how you got your father's strong jaw, or maybe your mother's soft eyes. I had no clue about any of it anymore - it's not like I had a reference photo to look at or a number to call to answer the questions I had.
Fast forward to 2019, I've grown up, I've accepted that I might never really know what the other half of me consists of, but I'm still very curious and still want to get some answers.
This is when my lovely fiance stepped in to help solve the mystery, after a few years of listening to me talk about my history and deep-diving into all of the dramatic details. To my surprise, in the mail, I received a gift from him! It was a DNA test from 23andMe.
After a few emotional tears and nervous breakdowns triggered by the idea of actually taking and sending in my DNA test, I actually took it. I got a confirmation that I passed the little sample test and that in a few weeks I'd have my DNA ancestry results. According to their website, the average wait time after passing the sample kit test was about four weeks. I got mine back in two. So all of the time I thought I'd have to prepare for my results, suddenly vanished and was replaced with the reality of my situation. I'd finally be getting some light into my other half!
I couldn't look at my results alone, I literally could not bring myself to open the link to show me the answers. I knew I finally could get the answers to the questions I've had since I was a teenager, but there was also something about the unknown that really scared me.
Right in front of me was the key to unlock the door to my past, but I knew once I took the step to unlock it, it could never be closed again. Annoyed with my back and forth, my fiance ended up opening my results and reading them to me. I was, to say the least, SHOOK.
Turns out, my mom was absolutely correct about some aspects of where our family came from, but there was a whole other section that jumped out of the page. This had to be my father's side. I mean, the Native American, Spaniard and Italian were all definitely expected to show up on my results, and they did, no shock there. What really threw me for a loop was the next three categories...
Turns out I also had strong lineage from Africa, specifically 15% - Sub-Saharan Africa and Northern African. French and Arabian heritage was also reported in the findings. To make things even crazier, in my report, it also said I was 11% British and Irish, with relatives that had been in North London in the past 200 years.
After reading into the findings a little deeper and getting to know the other percentage of my 23andMe results, I was honestly left flabbergasted.
I now had a clearer understanding of where my family on both sides could have hailed from, but now my big question was...what did I really get from this man I called my father? Unfortunately, when I went to go check on the connections side of things on the 23andMe app, I was just left with more questions. I had one relative on the list that was a first cousin, according to their findings, but an even longer list of second and third cousins.
Though some of my connections do have certain traits and information that lines up with the little amount of information I have, none of these people have been able to guide me in the right direction of who my paternal father is. So now, on my quest to find my father, I am left here wondering and waiting to see if he or anyone who may be a close relative to him will potentially take a 23andMe test and show up on my connections list.
Till then, I'll keep living my life, I'll keep searching for him and asking questions that I may never get answers to.
