We have moved into a lovely new flat. The children are happier. Both my girls are now at high school, Anna a freshman and Katie a junior. They can walk to school. We love the neighbourhood. There is a bagel shop right opposite that they keep running over to. I had been told that it takes at least two years after a divorce for things to be normal again, and it had taken two years to get this right. I didn’t want to hear it at the time, but it was true. I had underestimated how long the adjustment would take. But here we are, celebrating Christmas in our new home. Life is feeling better.
A few months earlier I had been at an adoption conference – I attended them regularly now. I sat in a room listening to a man talk about a new DNA organisation, 23andMe. This is another organisation, alongside Ancestry, that has been set up as a way to connect with family members. After spitting in a test tube they can predict your ethnicity and match you up with other family members who have also taken the test. There is now a way to test both sexes with an autosomal test, so a woman can now get matched with their paternal side. It used to be just the male who could take a Y chromosome test father to son/son to father but this new test, where both male and female share the DNA, can link the woman to the male side, opening up the possibilities for women to finally find their fathers. The speaker intrigued me so much that when the time came for him to answer questions, I walked straight up to the microphone.
‘Hi, I’m British, and I wondered if you’d had any luck with Europeans taking the DNA test?’
(After I had been to the Italian festival in Clerkenwell Road in London, I joined a page on Facebook for Les Enfants Terribles, the club where my birth parents had met. But I had no luck in finding my father, or anyone who knew him and I knew the whole thing was a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack. I hadn’t thought about my birth father for a while after that, accepting that the likelihood of finding him after all this time would be very slim but I’d been hearing some stories and the DNA tests were inspiring me to think about searching again.)
‘I’m afraid not. Europeans don’t tend to do them. Our database shows us it’s mainly Americans,’ the speaker told me.
At this my heart sank. However, it seemed new discoveries in DNA were changing things for the adoption community. The speaker advised me to sign up and take a test on Ancestry.com, as they have a bigger database. So I did, later that same day, and sent off a sample of my spit. I was put in touch with a woman called Gaye – who I now call my ‘DNA search angel’ – whose job is to then pool my results together from the three main sites that now exist: Ancestry, 23andMe and Family Tree DNA. I told myself I wouldn’t get my hopes up, after all my previous searches, but when my results came back, I couldn’t help but be excited – they show that I really am Italian. After all this time, I just knew it. It made it all the more real, like beginning again.