by Tim Kreider
Sophie and Amy, meanwhile, who had never been told that their mother had had a previous child, intuited that something was up. (All this I learned from them later, in debriefing over cocktails.) Their mother had been drifting around the house in an absent, dreamy way, dropping cryptic remarks about the past, like some haunted Gothic heroine. At the same time, she seemed happier than they’d ever seen her—lighter, younger. Sophie almost wondered whether she could be having an affair. Amy caught her compiling what looked like a family medical history on her laptop, and asked her what it was for. Her mother yelped, “I don’t have to tell you everything!” and snapped the laptop shut. In a deductive coup worthy of Nancy Drew, Amy called up her sister, who was visiting New York for the weekend and was at that moment in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and said: “So I think we might have a secret half sibling.” Sophie sat down on a bench.
When friends asked me how I felt before going to meet my biological mother for the first time, my honest answer was: I have no idea. The emotions involved were too vast for me to detect, like our solar system’s quarter-billion-year revolution around the galactic center. I went into that meeting with the same here-goes fatalism with which I embark on first dates: at this point in my life I figure it’s no use trying to cover up who I am—I just show up and say This is me and hope they don’t hate me. Panicking at the last minute and in need of props, I took along some visual aids—old baby photos and childhood drawings, in case she wanted to know what she’d missed. At the last minute the disquieting thought occurred to me that although as far as I was concerned this was our first meeting, she would remember me. I wondered whether I would recognize her smell.
The first time Rachel saw me it gave her an ache she described as like homesickness, because she’d thought the last member of her father’s side of the family, the devilish-eyed Campbell clan, had died off, but now she saw one of them, still alive. Innocuous expressions I wasn’t even conscious of making—an equivocal shrug of the eyebrows, mouth tugged to one side in chagrin—gave her chills of recognition. I know that I look like Rachel because friends I haven’t introduced her to yet can easily pick her out of a crowd, but the resemblance must be so obvious that it’s invisible to me, like the off-putting strangeness of your own recorded voice.
There were a number of similarities between us, some of them all the more unsettling because they seemed so trivial. We’re both atheists; apparently her father had been a nonbeliever in the fifties, and Rachel had actually hoped to make it a condition of my adoption that I not be given to religious parents. (I had to break it to her that I’d been raised by Mennonites, but reassured her I’d turned out godless anyway.) We were both passionately opinionated leftists of the school that holds that political change is best effected through strident ranting over drinks. It emerged that we’d been celebrating in adjacent bars on the National Mall in Washington on Inauguration Day in 2009. We had the same favorite scotch—Lagavulin, a rarefied taste, so rich and peaty that a whiff of it singes your eyelids. When I mentioned that I baked pies, Rachel’s face went suddenly still and wary, like a deer hearing a rustle in the underbrush. “Who taught you to make pies?” she asked. “No one,” I shrugged. “I just started making them.” “I make pies,” she told me, almost accusingly. “My father made pies—he was known for his pies. His mother made pies.” It was as if a pie gene had switched on in my thirties. Somehow this was even stranger to me than the possibility that my deepest beliefs and political convictions were predetermined. It only makes sense that something like palate would be heritable, but it was still disquieting to learn that what felt like a choice was encoded, as if I were a character in a Philip K. Dick story who learns that what he thought were his memories have been programmed.
A week after meeting Rachel for the first time, I had dinner with the entire family: Rachel, her husband, Simon, and their daughters, Sophie and Amy. They knew about me by now; Rachel had finally sat them down and said, Listen: there’s something I haven’t told you. I was even more circumspect in approaching Sophie and Amy than I’d been with their mother, who had, at least, known about me all along. I was a little embarrassed by my unexpected existence. I could only imagine how profoundly weirded out I would’ve been to learn, in my twenties, that I had a half sibling twenty years older than me. Meeting me must have been, for them, like suddenly inheriting a llama ranch. On the hand: Llamas! Hey! Neat. On the other: So, uh, what exactly does one do with a llama, anyway?
Rachel and Simon did most of the talking at dinner, bickering in a familiar pro forma way about politics, while Sophie and Amy and I mostly stole looks at each other across the table. They were lovely young women, luminous with youth, the awkwardness of adolescence still clinging to them. Sophie still sometimes assumed the gawky, unself-conscious poses of a girl on a bed full of stuffed animals; when I’d ask Amy a question she’d duck her head and answer in a flustered dismissive rush that forced you to crane forward to hear. Sophie was the more forthcoming one; I could tell already that Amy tended to go quiet around her older sister. But I also thought I caught glimmers of an affinity between us, the way you’ll see someone at a party and know right away you’re going to like them. I noticed our eyes were all the same blue.
After dinner, Sophie and Amy and I went out for a drink, just us kids. The three of us sat on plush lounge chairs having martinis, all being excessively courteous and self-conscious and frantically curious about each other. We were trying to catch up on twenty years in one night; it was hard to bear in mind, or believe, that we were going to know each other for the rest of our lives. We exchanged birthdays and middle names. Sophie said that, in retrospect, knowing about me made so much sense of so many things about their—our—mother. We all stared at each other and said whoah, spooked by the words “our mother.” We were improvising the rules of our relationship as we went along, abruptly overconfiding, catching ourselves and feeling embarrassed, then figuring aah, screw it, we’re related and blundering ahead. “Half-sibling protocol,” we called it. We invented our own self-congratulatory familial toast. They confessed that they’d always fantasized, in a childish, daydreamy way, about having an older brother. “We’re just so happy you exist,” said Sophie.
Years ago when my friend Carol, who was also adopted, had her first child, she called me and said, “I’m telling you, Tim—you gotta have kids. It’s incredible.” I’m afraid I may actually have laughed at her. It seemed so presumptuous, like strangers showing up on your doorstep expecting you to switch religions before they leave. I charitably attributed her advice to hormonal delirium and forgot about it until the day, years later, when I met my own biological family. It was only then that I understood what Carol had been trying to tell me: what it was like to know someone you were related to for the first time in your life.
I am a terrible man who routinely deletes the baby pictures people send me without a glance. (Sorry, they’re babies—they all look the same.) I’d heard stories about new fathers being zapped with overwhelming love for their newborns, all rational misgivings instantly vaporized, and had regarded these reports the way I did the testimonials of the born again, as subjectively real and powerful experiences that were evidently inaccessible to me, like schizophrenia. But now, embarrassingly, I was acting like a new father myself: mentioning my new sisters on tenuous pretexts, boring people with little stories about them, foisting their photos on polite acquaintances. I emailed a picture of my sisters and myself to friends with, as its only caption, an exclamatory string of little heart emoticons. My friend Annie replied: “Who are you?” I sounded exactly as deluded as parents do gushing about their exceptional children: they were so intelligent and preternaturally self-aware, so far ahead of anywhere I was when I was their age, such lovely, warm, openhearted young women. Listening indulgently, my friends just smiled, genuinely happy for me but not without a certain toldja-so amusement. I had never been so blindsided by affection.
It certainly helped that Sophie and Amy were exactly the kind
s of people I would’ve hoped they’d be if I’d tried to imagine them. Sophie had majored in psychology—and she was intimidatingly astute at reading people—but she also loved to write. Her favorite novel, Infinite Jest, was also one of mine. Amy was a serious and insightful reader, too, and also doodled compulsively. Her mother told me that she’d been doodling at a party when someone had commented that she sure liked to draw, and she’d said casually: “Yeah, my brother’s a cartoonist.” (She had known about me, at that point, for about three weeks.) They were very much their own people, and yet I felt as if we were all the same type of person: smarter than was good for us, prone to gloomy introspection, moody and oversensitive. We nurture hurts, flagellate ourselves over our failings, glumly anticipate worst-case scenarios. We brood. (None of us can smoke marijuana—Amy describes it as “like three hours of bad therapy.”) When Sophie confided in me the unprecedented and stressful dilemma of being in a stable relationship with someone she really loved, I almost laughed with sympathetic recognition. Yes, Sophie: happiness is indeed a terrible problem. When Amy, remorseful over some pretty typical youthful screwup—typical of her and me, at least—wrote me miserably: “Alcohol, insecurity, poor judgment, and me have done me in,” I suggested we have this motto translated into Latin for our family crest. I was sorry that so many of the traits I shared with my sisters were such unpleasant ones to have, but I loved sharing them. Not that it helps, of course; in the end, you’re still stuck with the problem of You. But it’s a relief to know that I’m not the only one.
Maybe I would’ve seen such seemingly profound similarities in anyone I’d been told I was related to, the way everyone sees themselves described with uncanny accuracy in generic horoscopes (“You are prone to gloomy introspection, moody and oversensitive . . .”). What if the adoption agency were to contact me and say, Oops, so sorry, very embarrassing, ha ha, but seems there was a big mistake—that’s not your family after all. Would my affection for them evaporate like our reverence for a Rembrandt when it turns out to be an imitation? What if, instead of two smart, articulate, funny half sisters who love New York and novels and bars, I’d had two hulking monobrowed half brothers who’d wanted to take me to a fucking lacrosse game? It’s hard to believe I would’ve been as smitten with those hypothetical lunkheads as I was with Sophie and Amy. Plenty of people have biological siblings with whom they have nothing in common—brothers who listen to Rush Limbaugh, sisters who think shopping is fun—and they still have to spend Thanksgiving with them. It’s possible I just lucked out.
I felt like I had to dissemble my demented affection around my half sisters, lest they get the accurate impression that I was wildly overinvested in them way too soon. It was like being on a second date with someone you’ve already made up your mind you’re going to marry. There is no imposition so presumptuous as other people’s love, and it made me wince to imagine how it would seem to a young woman to have some forty-year-old guy suddenly show up out of nowhere all, like, enamored of you. But does it even make sense to talk about being “overinvested” in someone who shares half your genes? A friend of mine told me that the first time she saw her infant niece she knew instantly that she would donate a kidney to this person if she were ever to need one. Nobody loves newborns for who they are; they aren’t anyone yet. (“You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone,” the narrator tells his son in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. “Your existence is a delight to us.”1) What my friends were trying to tell me by sending me all those baby pictures wasn’t the kind of information that’s conveyed in a portrait; they were less like telegrams than fireworks.
“Do you think it’d be easier if we had kids?” my friend Annie asked me once. By “it” she was referring to life, which we were both finding had begun, only halfway through, to drag. Annie’s mother had recently died, and mine was ill; Annie was brooding over an incipient wattle, while I’d been getting more root canals than I normally like. Studies have confirmed what’s pretty obvious—having children makes people even unhappier. But what people want, above all else, is not to be happy; they want to devote themselves to something, to give themselves away. Some parents had told me that you couldn’t understand what it meant to truly love someone until you’d had a child, which had always seemed to me like not a very impressive advertisement for human altruism—most people only ever experienced selfless love toward people who were genetic extensions of themselves? But now here it was, a force as matter-of-fact and implacable as the gravity of the planet, the deceptively gentle pull of six thousand sextillion tons.
Sophie and Amy were not my daughters, nor did I feel particularly paternal toward them—in fact, between their precocity and my own retardation I felt about five years older than they were—but for the first time I thought I had some inkling of why people had children. It made the next forty years seem worth hanging around for to have these two young women in my life, in whom I had some biological investment, whom I would get to see become adults. It was cheering to see some growth and development instead of constant, incremental decline. Like anyone who’s lived long enough, I’d lost people—to addiction, mental illness, death and defriending, the irrefutable facts of peak oil, or just the attrition of time and distance—so it felt like a minor coup in the losing war against entropy, a temporary hedge against death, to get someone unexpectedly back. And it was exhilarating to discover within myself, at this late date, such a bottomless capacity for affection—an affection free, for once, from the complications of desire. It was like opening a window to let in the first fresh breeze of April after a long winter shut in with the stale smell of yourself.
Plus I took advantage of Sophie in a moment of uncritical gratitude and got her to agree to look after me in my old age. I’d just helped her to find her first postcollegiate job after a miserable interval of being unemployed and living at home, a well-paying position with full benefits that would allow her to move to New York City, her childhood dream. We were celebrating over a dinner she described as the best Chinese food she’d ever had. Still dazed, she said: “I just don’t know how I’ll ever be able to repay you for this.”
“Take care of me when I’m old!” I said between bites of tongue-numbing Chong Qing chicken.
“Done!” she said. We shook on it. Now that I’ve put it in print she cannot renege.
I reassured her, in all seriousness, that she didn’t need to worry about paying me back; it just didn’t work like that. And, to my surprise, I meant it. Helping my new sisters was a pleasure in itself. To me these girls were like lost princesses of Mars who’d crash-landed behind my barn—I wanted to bring them offerings of our humble earth delicacies, sno-cones and dandelions and jars full of fireflies. I wanted to give them hypocritical advice, forbid them to do anything I’d ever enjoyed, shield them from the kinds of people I’d spent decades cultivating friendships with. I found myself, while standing in the shower or doing dishes, scheming nice things to do for them, plotting to advance their interests in the world. I could see now why nepotism, which is so shamelessly unjust, is also so widely shrugged at. It’s only natural. Biological altruism! Genes—apparently they really work.
Of course, I was not an astonishing novelty to Sophie and Amy; they already had each other. They were also absorbed in the drama of young adulthood—trying to find jobs that weren’t demeaning, apartments that weren’t depressing cells, and boyfriends who weren’t dangerous imbeciles, to figure out what they were supposed to be and how love worked and what life was for, all while having highly demanding amounts of fun that made it hard to concentrate. So I didn’t get to take it personally or feel slighted if they forgot to call me back or flaked out or canceled at the last minute, as young people are known to do. It was the first time in my life I’d had to be the grown-up, a role at which I was unpracticed. But this was also the first relationship I’d had in which the usual rules of reciprocity felt irrelevant. I was doomed to adore these girls even if they thought of me as an obligation or a bother or a bore.
I was fooling myself, as perhaps most parents do about their children, about not wanting anything from my sisters. The things I wanted were just too large and scary to name. What I wanted was to be allowed to feel as if I belonged with them. “But you do belong,” Sophie told me once, as though it were only natural, and not even up to her. It seemed too easy, like getting to be in the same club as Thomas Jefferson, Herman Melville, Robert Goddard, and Miles Davis by dumb luck of having been born an American. Once, over beers, I was clumsily trying to tell Amy how grateful I was that she and her sister had been so accepting of me, when they could as easily have been indifferent or jealous or hostile. She said simply: “You’re family.” I felt whatever’s the opposite of heartbroken.
But of course it wasn’t that easy. Just hearing Amy refer to me as “my brother” or writing “us kids” feels almost illicit, for the same reason that saying “my husband” out loud sounds funny and false to newlyweds. You don’t automatically get to be family because you share DNA, any more than you truly get married by signing a license or reciting vows or kissing in front of all your relatives. Rachel gave birth to me, but it would never occur to me to call her “Mom.” And it doesn’t particularly thrill me to call my adoptive sister Laurie “my sister” because she’s as much my sister as my arm is my arm. Sophie and Amy had seemed to me, at first, like an unexpected bonus, pure and uncomplicated—family without baggage. Which is, of course, not family at all. Family is all about baggage—feuds and grudges and long-unspoken tensions, having fights and being forced to apologize, enduring each other’s unendearing foibles for decades. They are, like it or not, the people who won’t go away.