I’ve noticed a trend lately in NPE spaces: asking NPEs to extend compassion and understanding to our newly discovered bio-fathers, their wives, and the children they choose to acknowledge. As an NPE, I’m going to need to know upfront specifically what it is I’m being asked to extend myself about exactly. Because it seems to me I’m being asked to extend compassion and understanding to others for their emotional reaction to my mere existence. This is a ludicrous ask.
If I’ve misunderstood and instead I’m being asked to extend compassion to and carry emotional weight for people that are in contemplation about whether or not they’re willing to accept or going to reject me, this is also a ludicrous ask of an NPE. The entire supposition rests on the understanding and acceptance that the NPE is The Problem in this situation. I’m not going to ever accept my existence as a problem. I’m not going to accept that any NPE is The Problem. No one should expect me to.
I understand discovering an adult child/sibling can be stressful and cause emotional trauma to some people. Other people are overjoyed at the discovery. As an NPE, I’m not going to extend myself emotionally until I know that the bio father/family is first willing to offer compassion, understanding, and some essential information to the NPE. This is non-negotiable. Because on the NPE side over here, we’re grieving multiple traumatic losses and I’m not seeing anyone being tasked with doing anything to help us.
We’re grieving the loss our primary fathers as we knew him. We’re grasping for new definitions of the words, “dad” and “family.” We’re wondering whether or not we’re still worthy of anything: from our surname to inheriting our (now former?) grandmother’s china. In many cases, we’re grieving the loss of the relationship we had with our mothers, or at least having to come to terms with the idea that our mothers weren’t honest with us about the possibility of another man being our father. Or the fact she flat out lied to us.
Most important, we’re grieving the loss of ourselves. Being an NPE means you’ve experienced the loss of the very foundation of your identity. NPEs are forced to do the emotional labor of figuring out who we are now and where we belong. And much of that work will ride on how accepting and compassionate our father and his family is to us. Because if we’re shown even a minimum of kindness it will help us heal. Receiving a health history, some family photos, and keeping a door of communication open for questions are all things every NPE deserves. I think these are basic necessities. And I find it curious that in the decade since my own NPE discovery, I have never seen anyone advocating for compassion and understanding from the fathers/father’s family toward NPEs.
But here we are.
Let’s remember that while bio fathers and their chosen family can privately wash their hands of the NPE and choose to never speak of it again; NPEs remain effected for the rest of our lives; even if we choose to pretend we don’t know. We can’t even look at family photos without seeing what we know.
Many of us have to give “I don’t know,” answers to questions from our health care providers because we’ll never have the 50% of our health history we thought we had. We’ll never know what genetic conditions and diseases run through half of our family. We won’t know what medical testing we should get to save our or our children’s lives.
NPEs must figure out how to navigate what we tell our living parents. And our children. We have to carry the weight of making the decisions about what we’ll tell all those aunts, uncles, cousins and friends from all sides of our families, too. We have to decide whether or not we choose to reach out to other family members on our biological father’s side. If we choose to live honestly openly, we carry the full-weight of the decision knowing that we most certainly will endure “jokes” at our expense and negative comments about NPEs from friends and family that momentarily forget our NPE status. We’ll forever endure some form of shame for being an NPE which is ironic since the NPE is the only person in every NPE triad (father, mother, child) that has contributed absolutely nothing to creating the NPE situation.
We should be advocating for ourselves, the donor conceived, and adoptee communities. We’re people with no built in social/cultural protection.
We’re the last people that should be tasked to carry the emotional weight of our father’s consequences.
three branch tree 
Bravo!! Well said, ty!
LikeLike
Thank you so much for this. Isn’t it ironic that the dirty little secret becomes THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET and gets to be the responsibility of the person who had nothing to do with it. Wow. So true. I love this perspective so much. There is no therapy and there is no community other than each other – which is a lot but not enough. We need more – 10% of the DNA results will result in this type of thing – so they’ll be coming soon enough and they will ask for more than we did.
LikeLike
Beautifully said and written.
LikeLike
THANK YOU for putting my truest emotions and feelings so eloquently into words.
LikeLike
Hi Laurie,
Jody Martinez here. Nice article!
In response to your comment, “And I find it curious that in the decade since my own NPE discovery, I have never seen anyone advocating for compassion and understanding from the fathers/father’s family toward NPEs”…
Just today, in the Washington Post, I believe it’s the “Ask Amy” column, a daughter wrote in talking about how she does not want to connect with the newly discovered half-sibling. The commentary is overwhelmingly supportive and compassionate toward the NPE. You might want to check it out!
If you don’t subscribe, give me your email address and I will send you a gift link.
—Jody
Sent from my iPhone
>
LikeLike
My role in our dna discovery is wife and now mother of our newly discovered daughter. We all have built a loving, compassionate, honest, and authentic relationship. And it has been both an extremely beautiful and excruciatingly painful journey for everyone in this process of relationship building. I could write an equally one sided article from the perspective of everyone in our discovery that highlights their perspective and pain. But we choose to acknowledge that everyone has loss, trauma, grief, adapting, etc to navigate. This is a huge life change for all and acknowledging that and having compassion for that is what allowed us to be living life as a whole family at this point. We allowed each person in our family to communicate about their loss, their pain, their fears openly and that built the foundation for an honest and authentic foundation. Articles like this are dividers and place blame, which in turn, gets a negative response and keeps relationship an unmet. need. This is hard life changing stuff for all involved to navigate. Everyone deserves empathy and compassion and also need to give it to everyone effected in order for it to feel safe to move into a relationship. Like you said, this discovery makes NPEs whole world change and that feels unsafe. Well a family’s whole world has just changed as well and they are feeling unsafe. We find common ground initially, as strangers, through finding safety first. And build from there. I love our new daughter with all my heart and am thankful for the joy we all have found.
LikeLike
I’m thankful for the joy you’ve found through the work you all were willing to do. No one has suggested that you aren’t deserving of compassion. I said, tasking an NPE to offer their compassion while suffering rejection from their bio father and family is cruel. I said, tasking the NPE to offer their compassion while you decide whether or not to reject them is also cruel. While yes, everyone has experienced a life changing event, your daughter is the only person that bears no responsibility in the creation of this event.
LikeLike
I would respectfully disagree that the daughter is the only person with no responsibility. It is not the sex and unplanned pregnancy that is the problem here. It is the secret the birth mom kept that is the problem. It is not the human being searching for biology. It’s trying to figure out how to absorb what none of us knew and make sense of it. My husband had no idea there was a pregnancy and if he had, he would have taken responsibility. He did feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility when we had our discovery. And together we did everything we could to help her and our raised kids and also us work through the emotions and changes. However, it very soon became clear that at this point in life there really wasn’t any responsibility either after sharing the information she was asking for. The actual next step was relationship building, not responsibility. I do think everyone should show compassion to each other no matter your place in the discovery. This is trauma and change and loss and as humans, if we’re looking to connect through that, we show empathy and compassion without comparing. It’s not a competition of who hurts worse or who has the most loss. Because we all did that, we slowly became a family with another beautiful person and her wife now part of it. I’m not sure how a relationship builds if any one person doesn’t show these qualities toward each other. Isn’t that what family does?
LikeLike
I think laying the entire responsibilty on the shoulders of the birth mother is a good way to extricate the father. If a mother had sexual intercourse with another person within the month, she may not have known for certain the paternity of the child. She could be off by month due to a skipped menstrual cycle. Most women didn’t know for certain they were pregnant for a couple of months. Pre 1980 marriage and birth records bear this out. A lot can happen in the span of a couple of months. Of course, I’m talking about the days prior to ultrasound/DNA testing.
Who’s to say who would do what many years after the fact? I suppose it’s common to imagine that all of our choices would be heroic. It’s fine to assume the best about people. I’m not suggesting that anyone assume the worse about anyone. I’m simply not going to validate someone’s negative emotions about an NPE’s existence. That’s all. This doesn’t negate anyone’s feelings. Everyone is free to feel their feelings. And of course, people are free to get their negative feelings about other people being alive validated elsewhere.
LikeLike
I don’t think most bf or their families are denying the pain and hardship that being an npe, adopted or donor conceived goes through while acknowledging that they are also struggling. In fact when we found out, as a mother myself, I instinctively knew what this meant as I would never do this to my own child. The problem is the situation in itself that is disturbing to new found families as it is to npe’s. From conception to birth there is a period of at least nine months for parents to plan, prepare and determine their feelings and work through those feelings as a baby is being developed. When a bf and his family is found, there is no time to plan, prepare or anticipate a child, as soon a match is made, an adult child makes contact, a bf now has an instant family member that society as well as the adult child has told them that they need to take responsibility for. Most men meet the challenge without having the time to prepare with understanding and compassion. However meeting a challenge in the moment doesn’t necessarily mean it will be long lasting. The fact still remains an adult child is a grown adult who is meeting another grown adult and their families regardless of familial/dna connection. Showing compassion and understanding is just the grown up thing to do regardless of the nature of the relationship.
LikeLike
I have no obligation to offer compassion to a person for the resentment they feel about my existence. I can feel perfectly neutral about them whether or not they feel perfectly neutral about me. I can suggest they seek help with a therapist to work through their feelings and I can wish them well. Because I do wish them well.
No one gave me 9 months of mental prep time to accept the reality of my paternity. And society failed to compel my natural father to do much about my existence as is so often the case for NPEs. I’m not advocating for any particular relationship between NPEs and their fathers other than a medical history, some family photos, and an open door for questions. I think these are fair expectations.
LikeLike
I’m wondering if your birth mother gave your biological father the chance to know and honor your existence when you were conceived? Really it’s not society’s responsibility to force any human being into a relationship in any situation. It should be, however, your birth mother’s responsibility to share the pregnancy with her partner. I see so often that this is not mentioned. It’s this right of the birthmom to keep fathers unknowing that causes a lifetime of stolen memories and relationship and bonding to happen. That doesn’t seem to be ok as a father should be able to know if he has a child. I know that doesn’t speak to the donor situations. I haven’t met many people in that dynamic.
I also would ask you to consider that maybe it’s not resentment toward you that was the feeling. I haven’t heard any wife or bio father I’ve talked to say they had resentment toward the npe. I’ve heard a lot of stories of relationships that ended but never because they resented the human being who was the npe. There are so many other things that keep a relationship happening and many of them have nothing to do with the feeling of resentment.
LikeLike
I wondering if I’ll choose to share that part of my story.
I’ve heard many stories of NPE rejection due to resentment from a wife. These are relationships that never begin. I’m not speaking about NPE and families that meet up and later choose not to keep a close connection. From the stories I’ve heard, in these situations, the relationships seem to just run their course.
LikeLike
Best line ever…”Because on the NPE side over here, we’re grieving multiple traumatic losses and I’m not seeing anyone being tasked with doing anything to help us.” Thank you for saying something that needed to be said out loud. Carrying the emotional weight of choices other people made is exhausting.
LikeLike