I’m Italian?

How a DNA test, not mine, changed my life

Tracey Edelist exploring her Italian roots

I found out I’m half Italian on the last Sunday afternoon of February 2022, and now I’m the kind of person who tells secrets.

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Sitting at the dining room table, frustrated with the extent of plagiarism in the third-year sociology assignments I’m grading, my muscles twitch when my phone signals a message from my eldest child. I search for the sound’s source, wondering if something’s wrong. I find my phone on the kitchen island, shoulders relaxing when I read Ezra’s random question about family history. Welcoming the distraction from reading other authors’ words students have passed off as their own, I text confirmation to Ezra that my parents have English and Scottish backgrounds, curious about why they’re asking.

Ezra: Hmmm. I did a DNA test and the results show only 17% of my DNA from you is British, the rest is Italian – 30%.

Me: What? Weird!?!

I think there must be a mistake, but my estranged birth mother, a woman pressured into marrying her 19-year-old fiancé (my dad) fifty years ago to have a child she didn’t want (me) is right there in Ezra’s results, having done the test too. Since this woman, who left Dad and abandoned me as a baby, is accurately identified as Ezra’s grandmother, the lab results must be correct: A woman we don’t know, an aunt with 100% Italian DNA, shares half her genes with my father. How can that be? Ezra tries to make sense of the DNA data while I try to understand how this unknown aunt could be Dad’s sister. I run through mind-bending theories of possible scandalous behaviors in my grandparents’ past. Adoption? Affairs? Switched at birth? How can my dad be Italian and not know it?

“You know, there’s another explanation.” Ian’s standing at the island, face fashioned like a doctor giving bad news to a patient—steady, sorry, and a little scared. He’d been quiet for 45 minutes waiting for me to figure things out on my own, while Ezra and I scrambled around in confused circles. I stop pacing. My blue eyes look into my husband’s kind brown eyes holding the magnitude of what he wants me to understand.

Dad’s not Italian; I am.

I sit with a clang on the metal stool across from him. My head drops onto my arms and I forget how to breathe, but I must be breathing because my glasses become foggy and my face too hot. Childhood memories and Dad’s stories of my early life flip fast and frantic across my closed eyelids. Time speeds up and slows down, goes backward and forward. I don’t want it to make sense, this other explanation, but it does. When I open my eyes and sit up, I ignore the buzzing in my ears and fuzziness of the room that remains even after wiping my glasses on my shirt.

Me: What if Grandpa isn’t my father?!

It’s like I’m talking about someone else as I share Ian’s theory, the only plausible one, with Ezra. Reality fades. I grasp for what I know. My kids come from me and Ian; we haven’t betrayed them. This truth is the only thought that grounds me.

Me: I’m questioning my whole existence!

By nightfall, after hours of online searching, we find social media accounts and pictures of Unknown Aunt, who looks like Ezra. Most informative, I find her mother’s obituary. She had died the prior year at 97 years old, a juxtaposition to Dad’s parents who had died decades ago. Unknown Aunt is named as the youngest of three sisters and a brother—my suspected DNA father. He’s harder to locate online, but by the next day, I’ve collected four pictures of him at various ages, three found in his sisters’ social media photos and one from a 1975 newspaper article.

In one black and white family photo, he and his older sister stand between their parents in front of a Christmas tree. He’s about 6. He looks like I did when young. In the newspaper photo, he’s smiling from the driver’s seat of a car, wearing a wide-lapelled winter jacket and knitted scarf, arm resting on the open window. I stare at a male version of my twenty-something face, left eye more lidded than the right, crinkles spreading from their corners, a high forehead, cowlicked hair, and a familiar jaw, prominently squared at the back, softening into a rounded chin.

My brain churns along with my stomach, keeping me awake four nights straight. I float around the house, watching my unfamiliar body from above, with its heart hammering hard, forgetting to eat. I no longer know myself, seeing strangers in the mirror and in my children’s faces. I grieve the biological connection with Dad and my sisters, the identity I thought was mine. I grieve lost time with Italian relatives who look like me, time I can never get back. I grieve my trust in family and known place in the world.

I find a therapist specializing in adoption, finding no one with experience in, “Your dad’s not your father” trauma. Technically, since I was raised by two parents who share DNA with my sisters but not me, it was like I grew up with an adoptive family. It takes eight months before I begin to allow myself to feel what this means to me instead of framing my reactions around everyone else, worrying about my birth mother, Dad, sisters (I have four now, two new ones), birth father, and his wife. Eight months before I start crying and don’t stop for a week. Eight months before I’m cracked wide open and start letting the world in.

Had I not discovered my birth mother’s secret and where I come from, I would never have met my Italian father, sisters, and aunts, with their hair, eyes, smiles, and teeth like mine. I understand them in ways I never understood the family I was raised within. I notice we share mannerisms and personality traits, like arriving at the last minute (or sometimes later), an attribute that made me feel different from my always-very-early family, like I didn’t belong. I may have never sought therapy, never addressed decades of PTSD I didn’t know I had from maternal abandonment and childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a family member, kept hidden from my parents.

I may have continued making passive aggressive comments, simmering in misplaced anger at Ian and the kids, too insecure and anxious to identify and say what I really mean or want. I certainly wouldn’t have learned Italian and prioritized traveling to Italy, or realized high quality slow-dried Italian pasta and fresh cheeses don’t hurt my stomach, or how much I love the tang of fresh-pressed olive oil and the scent of Mediterranean mountain air. And I wouldn’t have discovered my love of creative writing while letting the secrets spill.

I’m content with the person I’m becoming. I think I’m a better mother, partner, colleague, teacher, and cook now that the secrets hidden in my body for 50 years are finally out. I wonder if my love of preparing and sharing simple, wholesome food has been passed down in my genes and I strive to replicate cacio e pepe, knowing the signature pasta can never taste as good as in Rome. I pay more attention to the beauty and pain of life. I let emotions move through me. I swim in lakes and oceans and seas, less afraid of the unseen, and wear a bathing suit no matter my shape. My body delights in the feel of new and difficult things, like lifting heavy weights, hiking high mountains, and being honest with myself and others. I give compliments generously and work on accepting them without objection. I free my grown children from my anxiety-ridden interference, or at least I try. I talk more and say what’s on my mind, and I write and write and write. I’m Italian now and I’ll tell you how I feel.

Tracey Ciccone Edelist has a PhD in social justice education and is a critical disability studies researcher and educator, constantly questioning what we take for granted in the world. She’s also worked as a speech-language pathologist and a fine chocolate entrepreneur. Her creative writing is published in Severance Magazine, The BlueBird Word, the upcoming premier issue of Carmalarky and won a Weekly Writer’s Hour contest and been shortlisted in Flash Fiction Magazine’s summer 2025 contest.