The Gift of Knowing Who the Hell I Am

The Gift of Knowing Who the Hell I Am

If somebody asked me what I wanted as a gift, I could probably come up with a few things. I'm not difficult to shop for. I can appreciate a nice surprise just as much as the next person.

But if we're talking about the one gift I would really like, the one thing that would mean more to me than anything wrapped in pretty paper, I already know what it is.

I want the truth.

Not a half-truth. Not a family version of the truth that changes depending on who's telling the story. Not something that comes with a disclaimer, a few missing details, and a room full of people suddenly claiming they don't remember what happened.

I want to know who the hell I am.

That might sound like a strange thing for a grown woman to say. Most people assume that by the time you reach adulthood, you have a pretty good understanding of your identity. You know your birthday, your parents, your siblings, and the basic story of how you got here.

I thought I did, too.

For most of my life, I never had a reason to question those things. I was the youngest of five children. I knew the family I came from, or at least I thought I did. I knew who I believed my father was. I knew when I celebrated my birthday. I had memories of growing up, memories of my siblings, and memories of a childhood that I thought I understood.

There were things in my family that weren't exactly peaceful. There were arguments, disagreements, and situations that left their marks on everybody involved. But I never imagined that one day I would be sitting in my mother's house, well into adulthood, finding out that some of the most basic information about my own life wasn't what I had been told.

And it didn't happen the way you might expect.

There wasn't some dramatic scene in a movie where somebody pulls you aside and whispers a secret. There wasn't a mysterious letter left on a table or a stranger showing up at the front door with answers.

It started with a phone call from my mother.

She told me I needed to come to her house that Sunday at a particular time.

That was it.

No long explanation. No warning that I should prepare myself. No hint that I was about to have questions about my entire existence.

I assumed I was going over for Sunday dinner.

You know how that goes. Your mother calls, tells you to come over, and you figure there will be food, conversation, and the usual family business. Maybe somebody will be talking too loud. Somebody else will be making jokes. Somebody will be getting on somebody's nerves before everybody has finished eating.

Normal family stuff.

So I went.

I had no idea I was walking into something entirely different.

When I got there, it wasn't just a casual gathering. Everybody was there, and my mother had something she wanted to discuss with her children.

This wasn't Sunday dinner.

This was a family meeting.

And my mother was running it.

Now, I don't know how other people handle family meetings, but my mother had the energy of somebody who had called everybody into the office because the family business was about to undergo a major restructuring.

She sat there like Tony Soprano.

I'm talking about the kind of presence that makes you wonder whether you should sit up straight, keep your mouth shut, and wait to find out what everybody is being called into the office for.

Except this was our mother, not the head of a New Jersey crime family.

Although, as the meeting progressed, I wasn't entirely sure what kind of operation she had been running all these years.

She started talking about secrets.

Apparently, there were things each of her children needed to know. Things that had been kept from us. Things she had decided it was time to reveal.

And she began going around the table.

Now, imagine sitting in a room with your siblings while your mother starts opening up about secrets involving her children. You're listening, watching everybody's reactions, and trying to figure out where this conversation is going.

One of my sisters was joking that my mother was a hitman.

Honestly, I could understand why.

I was sitting there thinking that if this meeting got any more complicated, I might need to call somebody.

And when I say call somebody, I mean I was ready to bring in Olivia Pope.

You know Olivia Pope from Scandal? The woman who gets called when everything has gone sideways and somebody needs to clean up a mess?

That was the kind of situation I thought we were dealing with.

I was practically the cleanup crew.

Do I need to call my people? Is there somebody who needs to handle this? Are we going to need a strategy meeting after this meeting?

My brother was cracking jokes. One sister had her own reactions. Another was quieter. Everybody was processing things in their own way.

And my mother kept going.

She was telling her children things that apparently had been sitting in the family for years.

I was listening, but I had no idea what was coming when she finally got around to me.

And then it was my turn.

I was 33 years old when I learned that the man I had believed was my father for my entire life was not my biological father.

Thirty-three.

Let that number sit there for a minute.

I wasn't a little girl who needed somebody to explain where babies came from. I wasn't a teenager just beginning to understand the complicated relationships adults sometimes have.

I was a grown woman.

I had lived 33 years with one understanding of who my father was. Then, during this family meeting, my mother told me that her boyfriend was actually my biological father.

The family history was complicated.

In 1978, my mother was married to the father of my siblings. While they were still married, she had an affair with my biological father.

That's how I came into the world.

I was the product of that affair.

My mother didn't divorce my siblings' father until I was around 15 years old. After the divorce, my biological father moved into the house where we were living.

So the man I had believed was my father wasn't my biological father. The man I knew as my mother's boyfriend was.

I sat there trying to process what I had just been told.

How do you react to something like that?

What are you supposed to say?

Do you ask questions immediately? Do you get angry? Do you look around the room to see whether everybody else already knew? Do you start mentally reviewing 33 years of memories, trying to figure out what you missed?

I honestly don't know what the appropriate reaction is when somebody changes the story of your life while you're sitting at a family table.

And apparently, my mother wasn't finished.

Because there was another detail I had gotten wrong my entire life.

My birthday.

For years, November 1 had been my birthday. That's the date I knew. That's the date attached to my records and the date I had celebrated.

Then my mother told me I was actually born on October 31.

Halloween.

Now, I don't know about anybody else, but finding out that the man you thought was your father isn't your biological father and that your birthday is actually a different day is a lot to take in during one afternoon.

I went into that house expecting Sunday dinner.

I left with questions about my father, my birthday, and just about everything else I thought I knew.

So let me get this straight. I've spent 33 years believing one man was my father, and I've spent my entire life celebrating my birthday on the wrong day?

Who the hell am I?

At that point, I was starting to think my mother had been holding onto a secret filing cabinet somewhere. Every time she opened her mouth, another document was coming out.

And the funny thing is, I can laugh about the way that meeting unfolded. I can remember the jokes, the reactions, and the ridiculousness of sitting around a table while my mother essentially handed out pieces of our family history.

But the information itself wasn't funny.

It changed the way I understood my own life.

And it wasn't the first time our family history had been complicated by secrets involving my biological father.

That part of the story goes all the way back to when I was in high school.

Long before I sat at that Sunday family meeting, there had already been a situation involving one of my sisters and the man who would eventually be revealed to me as my biological father.

By then, my mother and my siblings' father had already divorced. My biological father had moved into the house where we were living. I was around 17 or 18 when the situation involving my sister and my biological father, including their relationship, happened.

I remember it.

I remember being there with my mother. I remember the fallout. I remember the changes that followed and the way our living situation changed. I remember living in a hotel. I remember my mother having an apartment. I remember moving out of the house where we had lived with my father.

Those aren't things somebody told me years later. Those are memories I have of my own life.

I was there.

I remember the disruption. I remember the adults trying to figure out what came next. I remember watching a family situation change in ways that a teenager doesn't necessarily have the words to explain.

And now, years later, it sometimes feels as though people want to act like that entire chapter never happened.

Like it was the Mandela effect.

Like we all somehow imagined the same thing.

But I remember.

I remember what happened, and I remember how it affected my family.

The sister involved is someone I don't have the relationship with that I wish I had. There are things that happened in our family that cannot simply be erased because enough time has passed. And there is a difference between moving forward and pretending something never happened.

I have another sister, the one born right before me, and even that relationship has its own complicated history.

She was upset that I was born because she wanted to remain the youngest girl.

Think about that.

Before I could talk, before I could walk, before I could do anything to annoy anybody, apparently I had already taken somebody's position.

I came into the world and interrupted somebody's plan to remain the last-born girl.

I didn't even get a chance to defend myself.

I was just born.

And now here I am, decades later, trying to understand my place in a family where even my arrival apparently came with some controversy.

My oldest sister passed away a few years ago. Losing her changed the family in another way. There are relationships that can never be repaired because the opportunity to repair them is gone. There are conversations you can't have again. There are things you wish you had said, and things you wish you could ask.

When I look at my family as a whole, I see a lot of history. Some of it is good. Some of it is painful. Some of it is complicated enough that I don't even know where to begin explaining it.

And I have reached a point where I don't have the same relationships with my siblings that I once might have hoped for.

My family is toxic in ways that I eventually had to acknowledge for myself. I had to create distance. I had to separate myself from certain situations because I needed to protect my mental health.

That wasn't an easy decision.

People sometimes talk about family as if sharing DNA automatically means everybody should have unlimited access to one another. As if being related means you have to keep accepting the same behavior, the same arguments, the same hurt, and the same patterns forever.

But being family doesn't mean everything is healthy.

Sometimes loving people means recognizing that you cannot keep putting yourself in the middle of situations that continue to hurt you.

Sometimes distance is the only way to stop participating in the same cycle.

And sometimes you can miss the idea of what your family could have been while accepting that the reality is something very different.

I don't tell these things because I want to expose everybody's private business. My siblings have their own lives and their own stories. Their secrets are theirs to tell.

But my story is mine.

And the things that happened in my family affected me, whether anybody wants to discuss them now or not.

That is part of why the Sunday meeting stayed with me.

It wasn't simply that I learned who my biological father was. It was that I had spent so much of my life believing I understood my family, only to discover that there were entire chapters I hadn't been allowed to read.

I started looking backward.

I thought about birthdays, family relationships, conversations, and all the little things I never questioned because I didn't know there was anything to question.

I wondered what might have been different if I had known.

Would my relationship with my biological father have been different if I had grown up knowing who he was?

Would my childhood have looked different?

Would I have asked different questions?

Would I have understood certain family situations differently?

Would I have made different decisions?

I can't answer those questions.

I can only wonder.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that knowing who your biological parents are isn't just about having another name to add to your family tree.

It's about understanding where you came from.

It's about knowing the truth behind the relationships that shaped your childhood.

It's about being able to look at your own history and know that the information you were given was real.

I don't know whether having that information earlier would have changed my life for the better. Maybe it would have. Maybe it wouldn't have. There is no way to go back and find out.

But I do know that I would have liked the opportunity to know.

And there is another part of this story that makes everything even harder.

My mother is now living with Alzheimer's and dementia.

The woman who sat at that table and finally told me these things is no longer in the same position to explain them. I was there as she went through the painful experience of dealing with her illness. I have watched the changes. I understand that there are things she may not be able to remember or explain now.

And that hurts in a way I can't easily put into words.

Because when you discover something this significant about your life, you naturally want to ask questions.

You want to know why.

You want to know when everybody else knew. You want to know what happened. You want to understand the decisions that were made before you were old enough to have a say in them.

You want to go back through the story and fill in the missing pages.

But what happens when the person who could help you fill in those pages is no longer able to do that?

I can't just call my mother and ask her to sit down with me again. I can't recreate that meeting and expect her to walk me through every detail. I can't assume that the answers I need will be available whenever I'm ready to ask the questions.

And I don't want to turn my mother into a villain.

She was a human being who had a life, relationships, choices, and secrets of her own. I don't know every reason behind every decision she made.

But I am her daughter.

And I am allowed to have questions.

I'm allowed to wonder what my life might have looked like if I had known the truth earlier. I'm allowed to feel that 33 years is a long time to believe something about yourself that turns out not to be true.

I'm allowed to want answers without feeling guilty for asking.

The hardest part is that the answers aren't all in one place.

Some of them are with my mother, who may not be able to explain them anymore. Some of them are with my biological father. Some of them are with my sister. And some of them are with people who would apparently rather not revisit the past.

I can't make anybody talk.

I can't make anybody admit what they don't want to admit.

I can't force people to remember things the way I remember them.

But I also can't pretend that my memories don't exist just because other people would rather not discuss them.

I know what I experienced.

I know what I remember.

And I know that the questions I have are not unreasonable.

Sometimes I think people underestimate how much information about your family contributes to your understanding of yourself. It's not just a name on a birth certificate. It's the history you grow up hearing, the people you believe you're connected to, and the stories you tell yourself about where you came from.

When that information changes, you don't necessarily know what to do with it.

You can be grateful that the truth finally came out and still be upset that it took so long.

You can love your mother and still wish she had told you sooner.

You can understand that people make complicated decisions and still feel the consequences of those decisions.

You can remember the funny parts of a family meeting and still be deeply affected by what was said.

And you can love people while recognizing that you need distance from them.

Because that's where I am now.

I've spent a lot of time trying to understand my family, but I've also had to learn that I cannot spend the rest of my life trying to get everybody else to agree on my version of my own history.

I cannot make my sisters have the relationships with me that I wish we had.

I cannot bring my oldest sister back.

I cannot go back to high school and change what happened.

I cannot go back to being 33 and hear those revelations for the first time again.

And I cannot ask my mother to sit at that table one more time and explain everything.

What I can do is tell my story.

I can tell you that I went to my mother's house expecting Sunday dinner and ended up questioning things I had believed for 33 years.

I can tell you that I learned my biological father wasn't the man I thought he was.

I can tell you that the birthday I had celebrated my entire life wasn't the date my mother said I was actually born.

I can tell you that there were family situations long before that meeting that still affect relationships today.

And I can tell you that growing up in a family doesn't mean you automatically grow up knowing everything about it.

The funny part is that I have spent my life being Dakota.

I have a birthday. I have siblings. I have a family history. I have memories. I have stories about growing up.

None of those things disappeared because I learned something new.

But the foundation underneath some of those memories shifted.

And I still don't know what to do with all of it.

I sometimes think about that Sunday meeting and how ordinary the beginning of it seemed. My mother called. She told me to come over. I showed up expecting one thing and walked into something else entirely.

If I had known what she was going to tell us, I might have approached that day differently.

Maybe I would have brought a notebook.

Maybe I would have asked more questions.

Maybe I would have paid closer attention to every word.

Or maybe I would have sat there just as stunned as I did, trying to figure out how a person could learn so much about herself in one afternoon.

I don't know.

But I do know that I would like to have some of those conversations again.

I'd like my sister and my biological father to acknowledge what happened in the past instead of acting like it was something everybody imagined.

I'd like to understand more about the family history that shaped my life.

I'd like to ask my mother the questions I've had since I was 33.

I'd like to know what she remembers, what she wanted me to understand, and why she chose that moment to tell us.

And I'd like to have those conversations without feeling like I'm asking for too much.

I don't need everybody to agree with every feeling I have. I don't need a perfect family. I don't need people to pretend that nothing painful ever happened.

I just want honesty.

Because there is something unsettling about reaching adulthood and realizing that the story you were told about yourself was incomplete.

And there is something even more painful about finally getting some of the answers, only to realize that you may never get all of them.

If I could ask for one gift, it wouldn't be a new car, an expensive purse, or anything wrapped in shiny paper.

I'd ask for a conversation where everybody could sit down, put the jokes aside for a minute, and tell the truth without pretending it never happened.

I'd ask for the chance to understand the parts of my life that were decided before I ever knew there was a story to uncover.

I'd ask for the kind of honesty that doesn't disappear when the conversation gets uncomfortable.

But most of all, I'd ask for the gift of knowing who the hell I am.

Because at this point, I don't need another family secret.

I don't need another surprise announcement.

I don't need another meeting where everybody leaves with a different version of what happened.

I need the truth.

And if anybody is planning another family meeting, please send out an agenda first.

I need to know whether I'm attending Sunday dinner or the next episode of The Sopranos.

AND ONE MORE THING…

Now, I don't know who needs to get this message to Tyler Perry, Shonda Rhimes, Issa Rae, Ryan Murphy, Ava DuVernay, or somebody over at Netflix, but could somebody please pass it along? Because I'm just saying… my life has enough plot twists, family secrets, complicated characters, unexpected revelations, and unanswered questions to keep a television audience busy for several seasons. And the writers wouldn't even have to make anything up! I'm not saying I need a production deal tomorrow, but if anybody is looking for their next interesting story, I might want to have a conversation. Hollywood, Netflix, whoever is listening: I have a story to tell, and trust me, you've got material. Somebody call somebody. I'm available. 😂

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

Everything I write comes from truth. These are real experiences, real memories, and real emotions told from my perspective. I may tell the story with humor, sarcasm, or a little profanity, but I don't manufacture experiences to make a story more interesting. I write what I know, what I remember, and what I've lived.

The names may change when necessary, but the truth doesn't.

Dakota Denise