Shortly after I graduated high school in June 2018, my parents told my brother, my sister, and me—we're triplets—that we were conceived using an egg donor.
In an instant, our older sister became our half sister. My mother's best friend, a woman I'd considered an aunt, was now my biological mom and her children were my half siblings. I wasn't 100 percent Filipino, as I'd always believed. I was half white.
My life felt like a soap opera. For two months, I stared at my ceiling. I didn't brush my teeth. I barely ate. I just wanted answers.
"Why did you wait so long to tell us?" I asked my mom. Her replies—"I didn't think you'd understand," "You weren't ready," "Life got too busy"—were never satisfying.
Looking back now, I don't know what she could have said to help me accept my new reality. Family does not equal genetics―I knew that then, and I'm even more certain of it today. But even so, confusion and shame around egg donation persists. The more questions I asked my mom about her fertility treatment, the tenser our relationship became. She accused me of being overly dramatic. We started arguing. She told me I wasn't getting over the news fast enough.
It's true that, among my triplet siblings, the shock hit me the hardest. I'd always been sensitive—and my mother's favorite. I'd also trusted her the most. My triplet sister told me she'd long felt like something was off, so when she learned the truth, "it just clicked," she said. "My identity finally made sense." My triplet brother was mostly bothered that my parents had concealed the truth for so long. My life, however, suddenly felt like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. It would take me years to embrace the reality of being a donor-conceived person. |
0 comments:
Post a Comment