Ma Famille

A few months ago, I spit into a vial and mailed it off to Ancestry.com where I would await information about my ethnic heritage and be linked up with others who shared my genes. For many people, the results would be predictable, but for me, not entirely. My mom was adopted at birth in 1944. My father's side showed up on my family tree, but my mom's side was empty.

Until a few weeks ago.

I hadn't been to the ancestry website in ages, but I thought I'd check in. I had gotten an inner-ancestry message from another member. Ancestry had sent me an email a few months ago telling me I had a message, but I didn't open it thinking it was a sales pitch to upgrade my membership. The message was from a possible third or fourth cousin asking if I knew so-and-so, her delict grandfather who impregnated her grandmother and left. She wanted to find out about the scoundrel before she died. I had no recollection of hearing stories about a distant relative who scoundrel, but I replied anyway, even though I had no idea how we were connected.

Then, I saw I had a new "close" relative, someone who popped up between my aunt and my cousin. I called my dad to see if this woman was on his tree. She wasn't, which meant she was on my mom's side of the family.

I had been a little skeptical about spitting into the cup in the first place. What if there were people out there who didn't know that their grandma had a child out of wedlock or whatever seventy plus years ago, and now an entire family may have a bunch of skeletons uncovered. My mom's bio-mother was named Emily Corona and when Emily had a baby in 1944, she never could have imaged that in 2017 people would be able to track all of this down via technology that wasn't even imaged at the time. Would I want to ruin a bunch of people's lives that I didn't know?

I called my dad and asked what he thought. He thought it was cool. This was the fruit he had been wanting this tree to bear. He asked if he could be a custodian (or something) of my account so he could contact possible relatives of my mother. Since my mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's a few years ago, he has amped up his search for her family since she couldn't do it herself. She couldn't even spit into a cup to enter her own DNA into Ancestry.com, so my father needed me to be the conduit.

My Aunt Lorraine came to visit Seattle with my cousin at the time I found about this new possible relative. This was the first time I had seen my aunt in eight years. My family and I were busy with their visit, so I put Ancestry.com on the back burner. Two weeks later, my dad came to town--the first time he has had a break or vacation in five years. Even though my mom is in a nursing home, he had been afraid to leave town in case something bad might happen to her while he was gone. We didn't think about the Ancestry.com stuff, either.

The day my father flew back to Ohio, I got a message from Marissa, the possible relative.

"Do you know Emily Corona?" That was all it said. I wanted to talk to my dad before I replied, but he was on a plane. Before I contacted Marissa, I wanted to know if he had contacted her first. When we talked Thursday, he told me he hadn't talked to her.

I was nervous about replying. What if Emily were her mother or aunt, and she never knew one of her family members had another kid?

It turns out Marissa was adopted, too, and her bio-mother was Emily Corona. I figured that Marissa was my mom's half-sister since in the DNA stack-up she was not as close as my Aunt Lorraine but closer than my cousin. I emailed Marissa and told her my dad would likely be in touch. My dad called me yesterday afternoon saying he had talked to Marissa on the phone for an hour.

"What do think of all of this?" asked Jack. "It is not like you know her. She is a stranger. All you have in common is DNA. You have more in common with our neighbors, with Kate and Christy."

I was thinking about this. Now that we live in the hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest, we don't see our families very often. This spring, we saw Jack's sister when we went to Philadelphia. It was the first time we had seen her eight years. My aunt just visited, as did my dad. My son didn't know that my Aunt Lorraine was my dad's sister. He missed the memo, but why would he otherwise know? He met my aunt once when he was seven and my dad wasn't there. When I was a kid, all of my extended family except for my Uncle Bob all lived in the Chicago area. I'd see them for Christmas, Easter, Fourth of July, birthdays, graduations, and ballet recitals, plus major events like weddings and funerals. Even after my parents moved to Ohio, we'd trek to Chicago several times and year. I moved there for college and stayed for years.

My kids didn't grow up with family in town. They have to get on a plane to see relatives--long-drawn out, expensive flights with multiple time zones changes. It is not simple to pop into Ohio for the weekend as it takes a day to get there and a day to get back.

So what do I think of this? As far as my kids are concerned, they have never met my Uncle Bob or many of Jack's aunts and uncles. Jack has family in Thailand that he met once and my kids have never met. We still consider them family, but I wonder what my kids will think of family when they are older. Our family is pretty much just the four of us.

So where does Marissa fall into this?

I think of her perhaps as a new fourth or fifth or sixth branch of my family. I have my dad's side and my mom's adopted side who I knew growing up. I am part of Jack's family--I know both his mother's and father's sides. I have my kids with Jack. My Grandma Conti will always be my grandma -- the one who always bought Eggo blueberry waffles when my brother and I came to visit. My Grandpa Conti made braciole for Christmas dinner. When my Grandpa Conti died in 1997, my mom gave me some money from his estate. When I told her I was going to use the money to take a trip to Thailand and buy a ticket for Jack's mom who hadn't seen her own mother in twenty-seven years, my mom said it was a good investment. She had never been to Sicily with her father, and she wished she had. She thought it was important that I should meet the family that my future children would be a part of, to understand the culture from which Jack's mother came.

Families grow and families contract. Marissa is a new branch, like a new shoot popping off a rose bush or orchid. She doesn't take anything away from my current family, just as I don't take anything away from hers. She is new to me, but so was Jack at one point, and Claire-Adele and the Boy.