The fragile beauty and heart-stopping pain within Anonhi’s (formerly known as Antony Hegarty) 2005 album ‘I am a Bird Now’, is the closest way I can convey the deep emotion and feelings of loss I feel when I think about the possibility of being someone’s sister. I cannot listen to “Hope There’s Someone” and “You Are My Sister” without tears prickling my eyes and soaking my cheeks.
The day after my Ancestry.com results came through I received notification from the Donor Concieved Register. The lab at Kings College University had found someone who potentially shared the same donor and wanted my Mother to submit her DNA to help with the analysis. Given I had no matches closer than a 3rd/4th cousin on Ancestry I was not expecting THIS!
My Mum agreed and we set the ball rolling. I prepared myself for a 5 or 6 week wait for confirmation.. I tried not to get my hopes up but equally I was quietly confident knowing how the DNA matching worked on Ancestry- I only shared 4% dna with the 3rd/4th cousin match so clearly it’s a bigger percentage for a prestigious university lab to write that basically (in so many words) that they may have found a half sibling?!
Six weeks passed, I’d prepared for this wait but now I began to unravel as the weeks ran from 7, 8, 9 and 10. I must have been checking my emails 4 times an hour by now. I had the coping strategies to manage my emotional state but my ability to deal with the wait was wearing thin. I was beginning to be quite unwell. The report finally came through on a Friday afternoon after some persistent chasing of the ‘specialist case’ manager directly..
‘…by putting your Mother’s DNA in with the other persons DNA on the register, the link has now gone away..’
And just like that 10 weeks of hope and anticipation dashed. I didn’t understand. It didn’t make sense! That’s not how it works, surely? I asked for an explanation obviously. It’s too long and complicated to write here, but bottom line is they use different techniques to the commercial DNA sites and their technique is not ideal for discovering siblings… (the official partner lab for the Donor Conceived Register…)
I know there’s an element of ‘wanting what you don’t have’ in this tale. But oh my goodness this really hurts. I’d accepted I was an only child, but to have this possibility of a half sibling dangled so temptingly close then torn away again?
It’s a raw emotion that I’m still recovering from.
An experience I still struggle to get my head around.
DC people often state the discovery of half siblings to be the silver lining to this often distressing and confusing revelation. I have my DNA on a handful of international DNA sites, so I have many bases covered but the truth is I may never know IF I have siblings or how many there are for sure. The time period following Black Friday and Christmas cut price deals on DNA kits has been nick-named Sibling-Season in the DC community as the period each year where the databases are flooded with new DNA and the next cohort of family secrets are most likely revealed. . .
So I will live with the echo of this pain, with hope rising and falling with each new wave of DNA kits, waiting, waiting for someone to maybe say that I am their sister.
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