Happy birthday to my biological father.
I look at the picture of the day we first met just under three years ago and still cannot believe this is and always was my life. I still have to tell myself that this previously anonymous and secret stranger is and always was my biological father.
I still cannot believe that for 35 years I was kept in the dark. I cannot believe that, despite his anonymity, a commercial DNA test allowed me to solve the mystery within 48 hours—a stroke of luck that so many born of anonymous donation never receive.
I cannot believe the rollercoaster that was our first contact—my heartfelt letter, his receptive and excited text, then his heartbreaking letter that we could not meet because of his family. But he told me later he knew I would not give up. He knew I would respond. And when I did, he called me days after his birthday and left a voicemail I still have on my phone. He was “done with the tears” and ready to move forward in a positive way. He wanted to meet me.
When we met a week or two later, the connection was instantaneous for both of us. Hours of conversation about our shocking similarities and our differences. And I stared back at the face of a man whose own looked so much like mine. I looked back into my own eyes. I left feeling hopeful and more complete.
We grew close over the next eleven months. I met his wife. He and his wife met my husband. They welcomed their first official grandchild and I sent a card and later gave them baby toys my own children no longer needed. All seemed well but still uneasy as the secrecy and uncertainty remained.
Then it all ended as if overnight, just days after Father’s Day. He had come clean with his adult children about our having met and that disturbed the balance. Suddenly our relationship was “too much.” Our approximately 20 hours together, text messages, phone calls, and social media connections were too much. And it all went away.
I still think of him every day, even two years later. With the death of the father who raised me just two months after the intentional loss of my biological father, I cannot think of one without thinking of the other. I miss both of them, but only one of them is gone without hope of return. The other left because of his prior anonymity and what his family thought that should mean—and what it should not mean.
And so I still hope that maybe someday I can at least be able to text my biological father Happy Birthday again. That I can do what his former students can do. But today is not that day. So Happy Birthday, bio dad. I miss you.
Tiffany Gardner. Originally published to Instragram on June 5, 2021.
A Donor Conceived Adult 