…always trip me up, so it’s time for focused freewriting to learn about the sliver of thought irritating my brain.

In talking about stories, Dolly Parton said this to a podcaster: [Stories] are my truth.

And he added, I believed her and yet wondered what was being left out.

Eight years ago, a few months after learning the DNA news that brought Not Parent Expected (NPE) into my lingo and life, I composed a photo post for Facebook for the simple reasons that I didn’t want to keep that news a secret, and telling many people at once was waaaaay easier – emotionally and logistically – than arranging scores of individual discussions over time. Also, then as now, nothing in my bodymind experience made Pops anyone other than my *only* male parent, and everything in my nervous system, right up to my brain, affirmed that “family,” for me, was always a socially contexted collaborative endeavour more than a biological determined hierarchical framework.

The people in that personal bubble Facebook of mine, got it – or it least, got me. And thank them regularly for that. That writing accomplished two further things:

It started my journey to further understand the what and why of my parents shaping and protecting this particular secret – one that wasn’t like the “not really telling us everything about their lives before becoming parents” secrets that most adults carry forward, and may or may not tell as their children become adults.

It underscored my sense that origin stories are multiple – coming from parents, extended kin, personal and cultural ancestors, engagements with new people, and vital. Each new origin understanding stands alongside the others we’ve accumulated, hopefully weaving together a consciousness that grows hearts and minds, a nervous system more richly understood for the co-regulation we engage throughout our lives, and expansive world views shaped by our willingness to always keep learning and remain present for meaning making that may well scare us to the bone.

Eight years on, I have a pile of essay drafts – most half-drafts that stalled out while I was part of writing groups with other NPE writers. Somewhere in the talking during online meet ups, each piece of writing stopped. My story felt out of place – more accurately, I felt out of place for feeling glad that my parents had spun this secret, had created a social origin story that profoundly and positively shaped me.

I now would call my floating away feeling “social detachment,” a transitional state of being that let me be present for others’ stories, even as I protected my own understanding of having made and lived a life in which this particular secret had served as a background scrim floating in our lives.

These insights seem to be yelling in my ear as I sit at my desk just now t0 set up for a writing retreat days on my soon screened in balcony. For this first retreat day, I was meant to be responding to a list of 5 questions from an NPE group asking people to reflect on their DNA and/or adoption surprises. One item asks us to consider what therapists might learn about the impact of “origin loss.” And I meant to be writing about having a therapist who asked Are you wanting to revise the question to answer it? How will that help you to write about how you understand your particular experience? Not if I had reworked the question. Not whether I had tried to answer it as phrased.

And it’s that one tiny word – loss – that allowed me to realize why and what had so often stopped me in the writing alongside others. For me, an “origin loss” presumes that humans have just that one origin story – the biological family one – that we would, could, should have had if there hadn’t been a secret about one biological parent. That one phrase set up a fixed binary for me to contemplate: I had an origin story. It was taken from me. I live in non-duality space – a space where “yes, and…” as it shows up as an ambiguity of paradox to wrangle in learning or life drives my thinking so much more than the “yes, but…” that shows up as way of doubting our own experiences:

“Yes, I didn’t know the biodude family, and I understand (a) my parents’ 1950s reasoning, (b) the social contexts of the three families involved, (c) my own life experience of feeling safest in the family to which I socially rather than biologically belonged, and (d) I can puzzle through what I gained from those original life experiences alongside what I can now gain from considering other aspects of my origin.

Whether it’s understanding the complexities of social and cultural and familial and individual aspects of my own life – or of this current world moment where cruelty, grievance, self-aggrandizement, fascism are global shadows over our lives – there’s one question I face daily, Gram’s asking “What are you going to do about that?”

In this NPE context, the things I get to do include living in the complexity of many losses, stories, and identities that become more multilayered as I experience a life shaped by acts of collaboration and cooperation, by learning to expand and extend my original thinking and by making a way forward with questions about cultural – or religious or biological – norms. And by saying not just to myself that we can hold more than one thought about origins – not all NPEs attach loss to the telling of the origins stories, and many NPEs experience loss as part of a traumatic life shift.

And today it clicked: Before my NPE discovery, I already needed to develop psychological, cognitive, and social selves in the plural – origins, connections, contexts, allegiances, identities – as a means of surviving and thriving. It helped that “What are you going to do about that?” as a guiding question that taught me to be intrigued by wicked problems – paradoxes, contradictions, ambiguities – and wary of binaries. I also often had to address loss in many forms through acts of rediscovery that helped me to expanding my ways of responding to loss.

There’s so much left out here – easiest to name is the initial week’s “What if I’m not Welsh?” fears, an origins question linked to biological and genealogical factors an Ancestry DNA test might reframe certain origins as lost. Yes, and…

This is only a start at returning to writing, at quieting that part of my brain that thought just over a year ago that it was safer to not tell my own divergent DNA discovery story.