New Family

It was Easter Sunday and my family and I were at a friend’s house to celebrate. Normally we just stay home and do nothing all day, because we are Jewish. But when our friends invited us to see what a traditional Easter Sunday was like, we left our house and drove off. When we got to their house we were welcomed with pastel colored decorations lining up the entryway, and the smell of ham wafting through the vents. While we were waiting for dinner to be ready we caught up with our friends, and thanked them for letting us crash their party. During dinner as I was talking with my friends, the adults remembered that they all took an Ancestry.com DNA test that they had not checked in a while.

  My mom showed her results, which revealed that she was 100% Eastern European, which disappointed her because it was more boring than anyone else's results. As my dad looked at his results, it reminded my family of the first time we saw his results a couple of months ago. When my parents first got their results, my mom saw that she was just Eastern European, while my dad was a greater mix of things. My dad also noticed that there was a leaf on the family tree, which pops up when there is someone who may be related to you. The leaf showed that this person was either my father's brother, son, or first cousin. He immediately thought that it had to be a long lost cousin that we never knew about. But after that day the thought of a new cousin never crossed our minds.

As he signed into his account, he noticed there was a new notification. At first he just disregarded the message, but to his surprise he saw a message from this long lost relative. The message surprisingly was from my dad’s son, who was now 30 years old. The message surprisingly was from my dad’s son, who was now 30 years old.  In the message he talked about who his birth mother was, and when he was adopted. The air was silent, no one said a word, everyone just had their jaws to the floor and no one knew what to say. My mom immediately said “This message is obviously fake, there is no way you have another son. This person is just trying to scam us.”. 

 I completely forgot about what happened on Easter until my parents wanted to have a talk with me and my brother.  My dad told us that he had a son who was 30 years old, which meant I had a half brother. I felt so many different emotions at once that I didn’t know how to react. As my dad showed me photos of my new family members I could see the striking resemblance between him and my dad. As all of this was still processing in my head my dad said “Don’t tell anyone about this, you cannot tell any family members of any friends.”.

At school I felt like I was getting weighed down by the biggest secret I had, and not being able to tell my friends anything made it so much worse. It was all I could think about, “what would happen if I told someone?” “would the entire school find out?” My parents kept on saying “ You can’t tell anyone, we don’t want to be the talk of the town.” But eventually they finally said “You can tell one person, someone who you trust.”

I walked into school the next day looking for my friend in the halls. As I told her what had happened I could see her face change, she was trying to take in all of the information so quickly that she couldn’t react. I felt like I was free of this big secret. I was so relieved that I had someone to talk to that wasn’t my parents. I told her that I was nervous about my dad forming a bond with his new son that would be stronger than the one we have now. I thought about how my mom must have felt; finding out that your husband had a son that he didn’t know about definitely made our house tense. 

But throughout the months of having this change the very nature of my family’s relationship, we didn’t let it split us up. We stuck together through those challenging times, and all of the doubts I had about my parents completely left my mind.