I wish someone could tell me. Let’s talk paternity fraud, a term that didn’t exist when I was born. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to find my biological father. Or try to. “Does he even know I exist?” I asked dear old Ma after she’d blurted out on her death bed that my father, the only father I’d ever known, was not my “real” father. Shocked naturally, I didn’t believe her at first, but it explained so much! Why people often asked if I was adopted. Why I felt no kinship to my father’s side of the family, the Daneliuks, or the “Danefucks”, as our schoolyard tormenters called us. Why I took my mother’s maiden name. It explained the bouts of estrangement between my sisters and I, my half-sisters. We’d always been so different, what little common ground we shared divided in two. Why Grandma Daneliuk favored my sisters. She must have harboured suspicions. Why I always felt like a freak!

I asked my *alleged father*. Equally shocked, he could provide no information, but sympathetic, took a DNA test at my request. The results excluded him, “as the biological father of Heather Haley.” First thing out of his mouth; “I’d never have married her if I’d known.” Thanks Dad. Poor Dad. By lying on my birth certificate, my mother had betrayed both of us. All of us, biological father deprived of any relationship with his daughter. I was stunned by my sister’s reaction, intense sibling rivalry. “Ha! That means I’m the oldest.” Neither could she understand my dismay, why I should care. She should know me better. I must always know the truth. Besides, I have a child and our health to consider. Ironic too, that fascinated by crime, intrigue and mystery, I wind up saddled with huge one, seemingly impossible to crack. I’m running out of time with everyone, including me, getting older. I’ve questioned my mother’s surviving relatives, all claiming to know nothing, though I wasn’t spared gossip. Apparently, Ma liked to have fun, often driving down from her home in Matapédia, Quebec to the CFB base in Chatham, New Brunswick to attend parties. Maybe bio-dad was stationed there, serving in the Air Force. I’d consult with a private investigator if I could afford to. Though I could go mad speculating, the writer in me can’t help imagining. I’ve developed a theory; she couldn’t tell me, didn’t know his name. Maybe it was a one-night stand. Maybe she was raped. She did describe such a scene to me once. Catholic, rural, Great Darkness-Duplessis Orphans era Quebec was not a good place to be knocked up. Ashamed, desperate to be married, her child legitimate, she lied. This is the real kicker; wed or not, knowing people would do the math, my grandmother tried to coerce her into an abortion.  Sins are more sinful when the whole town knows.

I’ve been advised by someone who does understand how much this means to me that generalized ancestor DNA testing can provide valuable insights, give me an idea of bio-dad’s racial, genetic back ground. Family Tree testing provides email addresses of people who share your DNA and wish to be connected. My only other hope is to visit the relevant villages back east and start asking a lot of hard and persistent questions, if I can find people willing to talk. Of course any such information can be extremely unreliable and vexatious. I will try to arrange a trip out there in the not-too-distant future. Hey, I could make a documentary. We shall see. I still hope there is some way to solve the mystery.

I envy adoptees and sperm donor babies; they have legal recourse. Clues. In 2010, a woman named Olivia Pratten mounted a lawsuit against the provincial government, the first of its kind in Canada. It sought to amend the B.C. Adoption Act requiring physicians keep permanent records of all egg, sperm or embryo donors and allow offspring to access those records when they turn 19. Not having the right relegates Pratten to “second-class citizen status and represents the province’s wholesale abandonment of equality rights,” according to her lawyer, Joseph Arvay, a veteran constitutional attorney. Indeed. It’s a fundamental right to know our origins. Arvay cited a passage from Roots, stating “that in all of us, there is a hunger—marrow deep—to know our heritage, to know who are and where we came from. Without it, one is left with a disquieting loneliness.” Try and explain that to my sister and long-dead mother, whom I still miss. I think she had every intention of taking the secret to her grave, but dementia prevented that. Ah, family secrets, all too common and often entwined with abuse and domestic violence.

Though it’s not in my nature, perhaps I should just give up. Let it go. I’m torn. Still wondering. Thanks Ma.

And neither can the poet in me help but imagine:

PRINCESS NUT

If I could have been inside
the hollow tree that night
I would have seen his face.
I would know his face. His body,

spiced with sweat salt and tobacco.
My father. Forbidden topic.
Fugitive. Alien, though earthly
as a cyclone to my mother, clinging

from an oak as he pried her limbs apart.
I would have heard howling, watched
his head rearing back. Full lips, gappy grin
revealed. Full lips, gappy grin like mine.

I would have seen the twigs
and russet leaves stuck to their thighs.
I could have picked up
the knife. Saved my mother.

I would know, what is his,
what is mine. I would know
he’s the smooth nut in a rough cup,
I, one of many acorns.