Life is Long, Part 2: Surprise, Surprise

A few nights ago I discovered that I am a Canadian citizen. This revelation came in the form of a text from my mom explaining that a Supreme Court ruling from December last year revised some citizenship rules, such that I am now a temporarily document-less Canadian. I’ll probably do the application process in the next few months and by this time next year I will have a Canadian passport.

My grandmother was Canadian. On a few occasions when I was growing up we went back to visit her extended family, “the old people” as my mom used to call them. But the old people are long gone now, and with them the connection to Canada. So this came as a surprise.

In his “Theses on the Short Story” Ricardo Piglia describes the form of the modern short story as a structure that contains two stories: a surface story, and a hidden one. His first example, an anecdote recorded in one of Checkov’s notebooks, is the densest possible expression of this principle: “A man in Monte Carlo goes to the casino, wins a million, returns home, commits suicide.”

In a modern short story the two narratives - the story of the gambling and the story of the suicide - are told as one. In a more fleshed out piece, one narrative would be delivered straightforwardly and the other would be told in an “elliptical and fragmentary” way, in the details of the surface story. This creates a kind of tension that is released in the reveal of the hidden story at the end. To a reader, this creates the effect of surprise, as the details of the second story are revealed, recontextualized in light of the coming together of the two narratives.

We are all intimately familiar with this experience. The past is constantly being recontextualized by the present. Our relationships with our parents continue to change as we become adults and understand more about them. Or we might notice a variety of feelings surface when looking back on the months of a new relationship as that relationship continues to evolve. Most of the way this happens is subtle and not very cinematic, but occasionally life surprises us with the revelation of a secret story hidden in the surface story that is the stuff of fiction.

Another example: I was conceived with donor sperm. My biological father was a college student who was probably a sperm donor because it was easy money. Maybe he had a higher reason as well, I don’t know. But I do know that in the early 90s basically nobody could have predicted that donor anonymity would be destroyed before the babies born with their genes had graduated high school. Everyone who donated did so with the understanding that, outside of very extreme circumstances, your biological kids would never be able to find you.

Fast forward 30 years. I got an email while I was home visiting for the holidays. It was one of many half-siblings, who had put together a group chat with the 16 of us she’d found so far. It only took one determined half-sibling to find a service that used a combination of 23andme data and ancestry.com sleuthing to identify our biological father. Within a few months of being added to the group I had his name, photo and contact information.

Discovering the identity of the donor has been a surprisingly unimportant development in my life. For the rest of my (now 30 or so) half-siblings, it’s had a variety of impacts. But I know from our sparse internet contact that the collapse of donor anonymity has been life-changing for the donor. He places a high priority on his privacy, and the sudden revelation of his large and disparate network of children has been a real challenge for him and his family.

I have wondered what it felt like to make the decision to become a sperm donor. Did he have any sense of the potential of this decision to come crashing into his life in the future?