A Broken Tree Read online

  After pacing through the parking lot for what seemed like forever, I felt an enormous feeling of rage growing in my chest. My thoughts were racing, and I started talking to myself, something I don’t often do. I remember saying out loud, “I can’t believe my mother would do something like this!” A sense of utter betrayal clouded my mind, filling it with all kinds of confusing questions and thoughts. I was an emotional mess!

  I thought about the small town I’d grown up in, one of those suburbs outside of Chicago with a total population of less than five thousand people back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I knew nearly everyone who lived there, and they all knew me and my family. It suddenly dawned on me that many of these people must have known some of this story that I was only beginning to learn. In a small town like ours, nothing escapes the prying eyes of the town gossips, and we had plenty who filled that role. I remember some of my school friends telling me that they were not allowed to come and play at my house. I never knew why their parents wouldn’t let them come over. Now it was starting to make sense: Their parents probably didn’t want them spending time at my house because they must have known about my mother’s exploits! I was mortified. If I’d known this at the time, I would have been so humiliated that I never would have come out of our house. I was terribly shy and socially awkward as it was; something like this would have caused me to withdraw from society altogether and hide myself in some kind of womb of my own making.

  I kept wondering why Mom would do this. Then I started feeling angry at Dad for letting this happen. Why didn’t he do something to stop Mom? I was child number seven. Surely he must have known what was going on by the time I arrived. The only other alternative was that Mom must have been amazing at keeping secrets, but I couldn’t believe this was even a remote possibility. Mom couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it. Surely Dad must have known what was going on. Why didn’t he say something about this to us? But no; in fact, he seemed to go out of his way to protect Mom. I remember once being mad at her for something and making an angry comment about her to my dad. He immediately told me to never talk that way about her again; he said that she was my mother, and I should always respect her as such.

  I couldn’t believe the feelings of betrayal and rage I was experiencing. I don’t think I had ever felt anything like this before. It felt like my whole world was coming down around me. I’m not one who normally gives in to drama. In fact, I find it a bit silly to watch people who live their life going from one dramatic episode to another. But now I was going through some serious drama of my own, trying to come to terms with very real emotions. I knew I would never be able to focus at work, so I left and went home.

  Below is a journal entry I wrote at the end of this day. I think it captures how I felt at the moment I learned all of this life-changing information:

  August 22, 2012

  Well, I was in for quite a shock today. I spoke with Jack Anderson, the guy in Oceanside, California, who is doing my DNA testing. He called to tell me that the tests were done and that he’s sending me the results. When I was there with Tim a couple weeks ago, Jack showed me the report I would receive after the testing was done. It was all very, very complicated, so I called him to see if he would just tell me what the results were, and I could ask him any questions I might have.

  Jack told me that 16 factors must be positive for paternal parentage to be established. In other words, if all 16 factors are positive, then the person in question is the real genetic father. One of those 16 factors coming up negative would bring that parentage into question. In my case, only 5 of the 16 factors were positive. There were 2 that were questionable, and 9 were negative. In other words, Dad is definitely NOT my biological father.

  I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard that. I was in shock. Of all the kids in our family, everyone was sure that I was an Anderson. I look like all our uncles and many of our Anderson cousins. I never for a moment thought it could be any other way.

  I was surprised by the range of emotions I struggled with for hours after the phone call. I was so angry at Mom for what she had done. She had betrayed Dad not just once, but at least four times (keep in mind that we know for sure Neil isn’t Mark Anderson’s son, and we’re fairly confident that neither Holly nor Carlee are Dad’s biological daughters). Was Mom sleeping with every sex-driven man in town? Is she some sort of floozy who would let any man jump in the sack with her?

  Then I was angry at myself for feeling so angry at Mom and for being such a hypocrite. I remember telling Jack that if I found out Dad wasn’t my biological father, I wouldn’t be too shaken by it. I thought I would handle it just fine and take it all in stride. Boy, was I wrong. I feel like such a fool.

  This leaves so many things unanswered for me now.

  If Dad isn’t my dad, who is?

  Will Mom even remember who my biological father is?

  Is there any chance that he is even alive?

  If he is, is it appropriate for me to let him know that I’m his son, after all these years?

  What would such a revelation do to him and his family?

  What about all the family history work I did for the Anderson line?

  How about all those feelings of closeness I have felt for Grandma Anderson, Jacob O’Neil, and the others? They aren’t even my blood family now.

  How many of my other siblings have been fathered by other men?

  What is wrong with Mom that she was such a loose and promiscuous woman?

  What genetic issues and problems do I need to be aware of now that I belong to a different genetic line? I used to be extra sensitive to the possibility of diabetes and cancer, since it is such a prevalent trait on my Anderson line. What new health issues do I need to be mindful of now that I know I’m not an Anderson?

  What will my kids think knowing that at this point, they have no idea who their paternal grandfather is, and that their grandma was a . . . well, we won’t go there, at least not now.

  I have so many questions that are running through my mind as I try to come to terms with this. I feel like I am on an emotional roller coaster, and I feel like I’m going to explode!!! I find myself looking at my own skin, my arms and hands, this face I see when I look into the mirror, and I wonder who contributed to making this body? Whose genes am I carrying? Is my biological father dead, or is he still alive? Will I ever know who my biological father was? Mom has lied to me so many times already that I wonder if I can even trust anything she might tell me about this, or anything else.

  I never realized why Neil felt so separated from the family. I understand now. I don’t think I would ever push myself away from the family like Neil has, but I certainly can understand why he feels the way he does. I am shocked that I feel this way. Part of me feels ashamed that I am reacting like this, while another part of me feels so betrayed and angry at Mom.

  I asked Jack Anderson to see what more we can do to remove any possible doubt that there could be a mistake in his tests. After all, the DNA sample from Dad is two years old, and he said that he didn’t find any hair follicles in the hair samples Tim provided. Fortunately, Tim was given Dad’s electric shaver when Dad died. He put it away without even taking it out of the holder or touching it. Jack said that it’s not the hair he needs but the microscopic skin flecks that will be in there with his hair. I decided to pay and have him go ahead and run additional tests on whatever he can retrieve from the shaver. It’s going to cost me to run another test, but if the rest of the kids in the family are going to want to have their DNA tested, they certainly need a reliable set of genetic data to work from on both Mom and Dad’s side.

  Ohhhh, my head hurts. The muscles in my chest are so tight. I’m having a hard time thinking straight. This is such a shock to me. I don’t even know how I feel about this.

  When I got home, my wife could see immediately that something was terribly wrong. I told her that I got the DNA test results back from Andergene Labs and explained what Jack had told me. The only thing she could s
ay was, “Wow! That’s impossible!” I didn’t realize it at the time, but my twenty-five-year-old son was in the kitchen and overheard me talking to my wife about it. When he came walking into the room, the first thing he said was, “Wow, Dad, how does it feel to know that you’re a bastard?” As soon as he said it, he realized that this was probably not the right thing to say, and it certainly wasn’t the best time to bring it to my attention. But he was right. I was a bastard!

  Once again, a flood of emotions raged through me. I was at a loss as to what I could do about them. I was confused. I was so very angry. I knew that I needed to show a degree of respect for my mother simply because she was my mother. She had done some awesome things that changed my life for good in some very important ways. Yet this new revelation blinded me to anything good she had done for me. I only felt feelings of contempt for her now, and I hated myself for feeling that way. Those feelings only added more fuel to the fire that was already burning so fiercely inside me.

  I had to call Tim and share this discovery with him. Tim and I had always been close. Since we were little, we had shared everything. We ran track and cross-country together, and shared school assignments. Most of my friends were Tim’s friends. We did things together all the time. In fact, I was held back in second grade because I couldn’t read well enough to keep up with my schoolwork. It was decided that since I was being held back, Tim would be held back as well. So, for better or worse, we even shared our grade school shame. Now, I needed to talk with him. I wanted to see if he could help me come to terms with what I was feeling.

  When I told Tim what Jack had told me, he had the same response as my wife: “Wow! I can’t believe it! That can’t be!” After a couple of hours of talking with him, I calmed down, and we started thinking about the implications of this new revelation. Over the past several years, we had thought about the likelihood that Neil and two of our sisters were not Mark’s children. We had both thought, wouldn’t it be funny if we found out that Dad was sterile? I was beginning to wonder if there might be some truth to that possibility.

  By the end of our discussion, we decided that with this latest revelation, maybe we needed to get Tim tested to see if he was Mark’s child. While I was sure that Tim was Mark’s son, I would have bet everything that I was Mark’s son, too, and we knew how that had turned out. Tim had thought the world of Dad; they were very close. It was no secret in our family that Tim had felt a lot closer to Dad than he felt to Mom.

  The next day, Tim visited Jack at his genetics lab and delivered the shaving residue from Dad’s old electric shaver, which Jack needed in order to do a second test on Dad’s DNA. Tim also asked Jack to run a DNA test on him. Jack was more than happy to run a paternity test on Tim, so Tim provided the routine cheek swab samples and a check to pay the costs of testing.

  Now it was time to wait. The waiting has been the hardest part of this whole ordeal.

  Jack knew I was struggling with what I had learned from the first test he’d done on Dad’s DNA, so he made the second test a high priority. When he had the results, he called me and told me they were the same as the results from the first test. The skin flecks Jack had retrieved from the shaver indicated that Dad’s DNA did not match mine. I was not Mark Anderson’s son.

  Now there was no denying the truth. There was no reason for me to hold on to the hope that some kind of terrible mistake had been made. I was not Dad’s son, and nothing was going to change that. It was time for me to start coming to terms with the truth.

  A month later, I got a call from Tim, who didn’t sound like his normal self. His message was short and to the point. He simply said, “I got the test results from Jack. Dad is not my biological father.”

  What! Are you serious?! Once again, there were feelings of shock, this time from both of us. My first thought was, “How far down the rabbit hole does this story go?” Little did I realize that it would go a lot further before we would begin to see light at the end of the tunnel.

  After hearing that Tim was also not Mark’s son, I decided then and there that I needed to buy a plane ticket home and confront our mother. She was the only one who might have the answers to all the questions we had. I wanted to see what she had to say about all of this. We needed some answers, and confronting her was the only way we were going to get them. The answers were in our hometown, where Mom still lived, and I had to go there to find them.

  I had no idea at the time that I would find a lot more than I had bargained for. And the more I learned, the more questions I would have.

  1. Kirkpatrick, Brianne, and Jennifer Harstein. Interview with Megyn Kelly, Megyn Kelly Today, MSNBC. September 7, 2018.

  Chapter 5

  Finding the Answers

  I love going back home to be with family and friends. However, planning a trip home to tell my mom that I’d discovered I was not fathered by the man I’d always considered my dad made this trip anything but something to look forward to. I was trying to figure out what I was going to say to Mom—how I was going to tell her that I knew her secrets. I think I was also worried about what other secrets I might uncover during this trip. I could feel my stomach tighten up every time I thought about seeing Mom again.

  Mom was ninety years old when I flew back to visit with her. Her body was worn out, and she could no longer take care of herself. Just a few years earlier, we had had to move her into a full-care facility. However, despite her feeble condition, her mind was sharp. I was always amazed at what she could remember; there was no pulling anything over on her.

  My brothers and sisters were surprised to learn that I was coming back home. For the past several years, about the only times I came home was for weddings and funerals, or the big mile-marker birthdays, when someone turned seventy, eighty, or ninety.

  My oldest sister, Holly, had already passed away by the time I made this trip. I only wish I could have found out what she knew before she died. I think that if she would have known what I had discovered, she would have given in and told me all the stories she had been hiding for years. She knew a lot about the family, and I had wanted to get her perspective on many of the conflicting stories that had been passed around. The early years in our family were so different from the later years, when Tim and Carlee and I grew up. I kept hearing about events and people I knew nothing about. More than a decade separated me from the older sisters. I was interested in learning more about what life was like in those years, but Holly had never been willing to help me find what I was looking for.

  These days, I think I agree with Holly that some family secrets do need to die; many people would probably agree. Sometimes it’s not worth dredging up a painful past. Some secrets have the power to do enormous damage, and uncovering them would do no good from generation to generation. On the other hand, it can be a tragedy for some family secrets to experience a premature death. Some are so powerful that, as painful as they might be, they have something enormously valuable to offer and need to be revealed. I believe without a doubt that the knowledge of one’s genetic heritage is one of those things that must never be hidden. Like it or not, much of what we are is embedded in that genetic code that makes us who we are, and we cannot afford to lose that information.

  I arrived home late, so I called Mom and told her I would be over to see her early the next day. I had recorded part of her oral history over the telephone a few years before, so I told her that the purpose of my visit was to get more of her history and ask her questions about some of our immediate family’s history. I said I’d come over to record more of her memories, assuring her that it would be a very exciting interview. She agreed, although she had no idea just how exciting it was going to be.

  That night, my stomach was churning, and I spent hours trying to figure out how I was going to bring up the subject of what I had discovered. This was not going to be easy. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to find any words to use that wouldn’t sound like I was accusing her of something terrible. That was not my intention at all. I just wanted some answ
ers so I could make sense of my new identity. I wanted to know who my father was, and understand why things had happened the way they did.

  My Search for the Truth

  I arrived bright and early the next day. Breakfast had already been served, and Mom was back in her room, waiting for me. We worked on her oral history for about thirty minutes while I mustered the courage to confront her. I knew this was not going to be easy.

  Mom and I had always been very close. In retrospect, I think she believed that if I ever discovered the secrets of her infidelity, she would probably lose me. She had lost Neil because of this very thing and couldn’t bear the thought of losing another child this way. Yes, I had been shocked to learn that I was conceived during a tryst with another man, and for a while, I was very angry with her. But with time, I had started to heal, and I was pretty sure that she would not lose me. I had to convince her of this so that she would feel safe enough to tell me the truth—all of it.

  Finally, after half an hour of sharing stories, I decided I just had to come right out and tell her what I had learned, and ask her point blank who my real father was. I started my conversation something like this: “Hey, Mom, Tim has a friend who owns a genetics research company. I had my DNA tested to see what it would tell me. You can find out all kinds of things with these tests. You know what I learned? I found out that Dad isn’t really my genetic father. What can you tell me about that?” Simple and to the point. I tried my best to not sound combative or accusatory.