"It was another detail that the rest of the family apparently knew but had never told me; they thought I already knew. The biology mattered less to me than the secret. Dad had been adopted, it turned out. A classic affliction of the 1950s, in which young, unmarried couples were forced to give away their newborn babies."
"No one else has ever known. It was just me, Dad and the hospital staff, Mum said, and they encouraged us not to tell anyone. Another decade passed, but my curiosity remained. When I saw an advert for a DNA website called 23andMe in December 2016, I signed up to its Christmas offer straight away."
The narrator grows up with a grandmother who is not biologically related, a fact kept secret until adolescence. Years later, they learn their father was adopted in the 1950s when unmarried couples were forced to surrender newborns. The family maintained strict silence about this, with the father unwilling to search for biological relatives to avoid upsetting his adoptive parents. The narrator, drawn to investigative work and storytelling, harbors persistent curiosity about their paternal origins. In 2016, they secretly take a DNA test through 23andMe, seeking answers without directly confronting their father about the adoption.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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