October 5, 2017: I’ve just walked through security at Rochester International Airport, thankful for the expeditious mercies of TSA Pre-Check on a morning that began at 3:45 a.m. I approach the monitors that list all departing gates and quickly find mine, then take a deep breath. Rochester to DCA airport in Washington D.C. via JetBlue […]
Who am I? This isn’t a question I’ve pondered often. I’m introspective, so sure, to some degree it’s crossed my mind. But these existential questions of self, of identity, are more like distant cousins than bedfellows. I think I’m ‘unique,’ but I think everyone else feels that way about themselves too, and thus, who I […]
I’m told that young boys tend to view the arrival of new siblings — particularly the arrival of sisters — somewhere between skepticism and outright xenophobia. But when my mother, seated next to my father, tells me, “David, you’re going to be a big brother in August — you’re going to have a baby sister!” […]
Learning you’re not your father’s biological son is no less unsettling on day two as it is on day one. I slept poorly last night. I had more questions for the mirror’s reflection than any night prior, wondering about the origins of the features staring back at me. A stranger. A man with blue eyes […]
Intuition is a compelling concept. It’s our mind’s way of steering us toward truth when our research and rationale have been exhausted, like an otherworldly power. Yet we have no evidence to prove it exists, other than an unexplained compulsion within us; a compulsion that engages whether or not we ask it to. Even if […]
[A Guest Post from Morgan] Sixteen pounds felt light when I boarded the plane for Spain in May 2017. My pack was efficiently organized with every essential item I would need for the hundred miles I would be traversing through the Pyrenees Mountains of France and into Logroño, Spain. It was my spirit that was […]
Mar 28, 2017 Morgan – I just checked Ancestry.com for the first time since I got my results back, and it looks like we might be close enough to be first cousins! You’re the only one I had on my results who was anything closer than a 4th cousin. I don’t know how this is […]
I wanted the first two blogs in ‘The Berry Chronicles‘ to land like a bomb. Not for the shock value of it, though I knew that would come in spades. But because it was the only way I could try to bring someone into the rawest emotions that I felt the night I got that […]
It’s Christmas Day, 2016. My family is seated at
the dinner table at my sister’s boyfriend’s house,
with his family, for a non-traditional holiday
meal. It’s a paper plate, buffet style affair with lasagna, homemade meatballs and garlic bread.
There are more pastas than I can name, with a
dessert spread that’s primarily a massive sheet pan full of cannoli off to the side.
Not that I’m complaining.
The voice of your dad, with your mother announcing herself at his side, echoes through the Bluetooth speaker system in your car with some smattering of a back story. “I know you’ve been digging into this DNA stuff, and I know you’re trying to learn information about your name, Berry, but…you’re not going to find it.”
In an instant, you’re confused. For the past six months, your DNA novice parents have acted both oblivious and maddeningly detached from these alarming, in-your-face truths. Now, the are sudden insiders to what you will or won’t find on the other side of this re…
