Three years ago, I found out that the people who raised me weren’t actually related to me. They believed I was their biological child until they passed away. My once black ringlets weren’t from Irish heritage at all, my “interesting” nose wasn’t from an accident I had as a child, and my gut feeling that I might be Jewish was actually true. My whole life turned out to be a lie.
My birth mother, who was a terrible person, got pregnant in 1966. She told a man that I was his child, abandoned me, and left me to be raised by this much older man and his elderly mother, who thought I was her granddaughter. I’ll skip over the details of my childhood, but the woman I called Nana told me my nose was ugly and something to be ashamed of. Nana loved me, but she had old-fashioned ideas about beauty. She and other adults in my life found a lot of things to criticize about how I looked, but I chose not to change when I became an adult. It was part of me.
Three years ago, when I took a DNA test, I learned the truth. The test confirmed what I had felt all along, and my “shameful” nose was actually a typical Persian Jewish nose, just like my real father’s. I am the spitting image of my birth father. That nose, which I had been made to feel ashamed of, is actually a family trait. Now, I feel at peace and proud of how I look. It’s no longer something to be ashamed of.
Here are some photos of me in my early 20s, back in the late 1980s, with “that nose.” The third photo is of me now, in my late 50s.
