On Explanation

By Parker Piscitello-Fay ‘22

I have two beautiful mothers, an amazing younger sister, and a sperm donor father. And, at least once a month for the past twelve years of my life, I have explained this to strangers, acquaintances, classmates, and friends. I have come to expect their surprise, confusion, pity, ambivalence, and slew of questions (on topics ranging from basic human biology to my childhood experiences). My sister and I have crafted and perfected answers to every possible question, from “Who is your dad?” to the offensive “Who is your real mom?” We have learned the Photoshop skills necessary to crop and edit our family life into one simplified, digestible image that we distribute in classes, at dinner tables, and on buses. This brushed-up image of my family, with its clean lines, beauty filters, and adjusted scale, is so convincing that I myself had forgotten, until this summer, that it’s not real. 

Sometime in mid-July, my mother sent me a link to a New York Times photo essay by a fellow college student with two moms. He had discovered his half-siblings through an online registry and had taken and compiled a series of images of them. The resulting collection is incredibly vulnerable, beautiful, and heartbreaking in the best way. His photos explore the very concepts I have been struggling to put into words for the past twelve years, the feelings I experience when someone asks, “What is it like to be a donor kid?” The essay also reminded me of a piece of my situation I had simply forgotten about: I might have half-siblings.

Later that night, I frantically logged into the account my sister and I had set up a couple years ago on one of the sibling registry databases. I found nothing. Then, half-heartedly turning to Google, I combed through smaller registries: scrappy forums and Weebly sites with some of the worst graphic design I had ever seen. I knew only the name of the donor bank my parents had used, my father’s donor number, a random description of his family members, some fun “get to know me” facts about him, and his physical description. So command-F-ing my way through blogs and forums, I was more than shocked when, one hour later, I stumbled upon a profile of a family with our donor’s information. 

And then, of course, I panicked. 

I told my younger sister and moms, sent frantic Snapchats to Wellesley friends, and laid down on the floor and stared at the ceiling for a solid amount of time. I waited to cry or laugh or have some sort of major emotional reaction. But instead, everything just felt surreal. After an hour, I hopped on Facebook and searched for everything I could infer from the profile’s username: the parent’s first name and location. Again, maybe just by the luck of the night, I was shocked when suddenly, inches in front of me, a family portrait in a Facebook profile appeared. The kids looked like me. Or was it that I looked like them? 

Again, I panicked.

The week after that night was weird. I told everyone who would listen (friends, acquaintances, extended family) about the siblings. I reminded myself on an almost hourly basis that this was real. My sister and I must have texted or said to one another, “We have a secret brother” at least forty times. Suddenly, I was reminded that the perfect photoshopped image, the one we had crafted, printed over 1,000 copies of, and had been handing out, wasn’t an actual photo. If the first nineteen years of my life had been the process of dividing up, marketing, and selling my situation to everyone I know, then this summer was like everyone giving their piece back and demanding a refund. Suddenly, I didn’t have an explanation or answers to “How does this feel?” or “What is this like?” Instead, I had a collection of coexisting and contradictory emotions, which left me trying to explain how it was possible to feel both lost and found at once.

Eventually, my sister and I decided to send a note to the family via the registry. After drafting and redrafting a message on the truly terribly designed WordPress site, I think we were both a little disappointed to get no response. We still haven’t received a response. The limbo feels appropriate.

There’s a failure of the English language that my sister and I have discovered over the years when trying to explain having two moms or being donor kids. There simply aren’t words to differentiate one mom from another mom, a sperm donor from other types of fathers, or a donor half-sibling from other types of half-siblings. Instead, my sister and I, and many kids like us, have developed a language of our own. We half-jokingly, half-dead-seriously refer to ourselves as “gaybes” (people with same-gender parents). Surveying donor sibling registries and websites, I have come across the word “dibling” for donor half-siblings. And while I provide enough context to friends so that when I say “mom,” they know which one I’m referring to, I have also seen kids use slightly different names for each parent of the same gender (like mom and ma). I think often about a prospective “gaybe boom” where changing legislation and ideas about LGBTQ+ rights in the United States could lead to a surge of children born or adopted into same gender partnerships. This prospect (whether or not it will actually happen) gives me hope for our vocabulary. Perhaps, with more people like me, society will adopt DIY labels like gaybe and dibling or develop better terms. Maybe, and perhaps most importantly, we will have the words to describe the emotions and experiences of being a donor kid or having two parents of the same gender. I look forward to that day. 

Until then, I still don't know what to make of my diblings’ photos, the fragments of their lives I've begun to grasp through Facebook posts, the fact that we all have the same nose, or the strange comical brokenness that comes with suddenly being the older half-sister of people I've never met. The whole process has been surreal and humbling and awkward. I don't know how to process this, or even where to start, but I do know I have an immense and indescribable gratitude for the people in my life who listen. I keep going back to them and find solace, for once, in getting to ask the questions. I'm still lost, but for the first time in a while, I’m letting myself live without explanations.

Sometimes once a month, sometimes twice a day, I will log into the scrappy and poorly designed forum and check for messages. When I’m bored, I will pull up the profiles on Facebook and try to imagine their lives together, separate, what they might be like, how we might be similar. I don’t hope for a relationship with these strangers, but there’s a certain comfort in a potential connection.

I have two beautiful mothers, an amazing younger sister, a sperm donor father, and at least three half-siblings. I don’t know how to explain how this feels to strangers. My sister and I no longer have a clean, photoshopped image to hand out like Halloween candy to those who ask. It’s a mess. I have trouble not tidying this up by saying that I have conclusions and discrete feelings, that I’ve worked this out and have some presentable and articulate thoughts. In truth, I’m not sure I’ll ever know how I feel about it. But I have learned not to expect, to let go of the explanations of my world that I had held so tightly onto, and maybe that can be a start.

from the November 2019 issue