3. Lucky charms and the beach house
Rereading and re seeing everything anew
Hello friends,
Right now I’m rereading Inheritance, a memoir by Dani Shapiro about how she discovers from a genetic test at age 54 that she was conceived via sperm donation. As a tall blonde born into a family of Orthodox Jews in 1962, her life was riddled with clues about her origins, only she didn’t know what to make of them.
Rereading a book has its own pleasures. Details pop out that I didn’t notice before and I’m paying more attention to how the book is structured. The first time I read Inheritance, was during he week after my own genetic paternal discovery. In 2022, the book offered a model for the reconstellation of identity that was rapidly occurring for me. Now it offers a model of literary voice telling a story of a paternity discovery.
2022 was also the year I made Fifty-Fifty. Just like rereading, poring over pictures in my baby albums forced me to re-see images, artifacts, and events in a new light. Suddenly I knew that portraits of two girls I never met were my sisters. Suddenly I knew that a man pictured with them was my father. And suddenly I knew that a ring my mother gifted me 30 years before, saying it was from an old boyfriend, was the one physical memento of my biological father that I possessed. I had to look at myself all over again.
Year 3: Lucky charms
My second memory—after the memory of being in the room with glass cribs shortly after I was born—is of eating Lucky Charms with a group of kids while we lived in the apartment I wrote about last week. Playing with marshmallow charms in the milk was a delight because I knew I wasn’t supposed to have sugary cereal.
Re-seeing the events of 1974, which included my first visit to the beach, has shown me just how lucky and charmed my life has been. How did a photo of my mother tied to a clothesline end up in my baby album? Comparing the above two pictures in the spring of 2022 made me highly suspicious that the man I met that day on the beach—and would meet again 17 years later—was not my father.
Metaphorically speaking, I was tied to the clothesline of the events that day at the beach house. The discovery of a name in the family tree of a 4 percent DNA match on Ancestry.com unraveled it. This new fact not only untied me and my mother from a misunderstanding, it also united us around the truth.
Nothing you read in this email, perhaps nothing that has happened in my life, would have been the same had certain events in 1971 and 1974 gone differently. I would have a different story to tell, and different pictures to share in Fifty-Fifty. Our paths might not have crossed.
It’s a miracle that any of us exist. The paths our lives take are equally miraculous.
The gifts of seeing anew
Rereading, and reseeing, force us back into the present moment. You’re a new person, looking at a thing or a person you thought you knew. And somehow at your core, you’re still you.
Two spiritual teachings guided me through the time of unraveling. One is the perennial question of Indian sage Ramana Maharshi, “Who am I?” The discovery of my origins gave me a lucky charm of the most literal journey possible with this question.
The other question, from Adyashanti, I’ll paraphrase as, “What doesn’t change?” I can sense, but not describe, what it is that hasn’t changed through all these pictures and what I see when I look in the mirror every day.
Learning whose sperm fertilized my mother’s egg didn’t change who or what I am. My existence is my inheritance from the Universe. For that, I am indeed charmed.
Is there a piece of information that upended what you thought you knew? How did it change—or not change—who you are?
We’re living in a time when buried truths are getting revealed left and right. Every time the truth comes to light, the world gets a little brighter.
May you welcome the truth with open arms.
Love, Lee Ann
Sometimes the truth comes to me in vivid dreams. Always a miracle to " wake up" while asleep. 💕