Sister insists on reader keeping her secret about her child from a teen pregnancy

Hi, Carolyn: In the mid-1980s, when I was 17, my 15-year-old sister became pregnant. She went away to a Catholic facility for a few months and had a healthy baby girl, who was adopted at a few days old. It was a traumatic time in our family.

I was not really “in the loop” on the details of the pregnancy or adoption decision, and it was one of those things never discussed in our family. In addition, our father was sick and died a few months later. It was a tough time for everyone.

Last year, I received a DNA test kit as a gift. I sent it in and immediately matched with the adopted girl, now a grown woman living near me with three kids of her own. Her profile stated clearly that she is looking for any information about her birth parent and family. I immediately turned off the matching option on the site, so I don’t think this woman saw that we matched. I contacted my sister, whose husband knows she had the baby but whose college-age children do not.

My sister was upset about the whole thing. She told me there was lots of shame surrounding it and she doesn’t want to contact this woman, saying it would upset our mother, who wanted no one to ever know this happened. My sister has been reluctant to discuss it further, and hasn’t even shared with her husband that I made this DNA match.

I hope my sister warms to having contact with this woman. Clearly, the adopted woman wants it, and I think there is a lot of pain my sister has been carrying around.

I also think it could help my mom resolve some pain as well. In addition, I think my sister’s kids may stumble upon the same connection I did and the whole thing could blow up.

More selfishly, I would like to meet this person and have my own daughter meet her and her family.

So far, I’ve just checked in with my sister every few months. Am I doing the right thing by hanging back?

Uncertain Brother

Answer: Yes, for now.

It was and remains appropriate to give your sister time to adjust to the new realities of her situation. Compassion is the only fair response to people who’ve just had the long-standing, agreed-upon terms of their private lives torn up and replaced by a free-for-all. Whether those terms were fair or healthy or not.

But while the compassion can be eternal, her grace period can’t, for a couple of reasons.

First, there’s the inevitability of discovery that you mention. Your sister is running out of time to be the source of this news to her other kids — which is, of course, her best chance at minimizing their dismay at being lied to.

If your sister really wants to pretend she’s still in control, then she might be too invested in that fiction to hear you. But please do phrase it bluntly: that it’s going to come out with or without her, or you, and you strongly advise her not to squander her significant “with” advantage. At least that way, you aren’t even a little bit complicit in her lie to herself. She has lost control of her secret, and time is not in her favor.

The second reason will probably be less persuasive to her, but it’s the better one: It is not your sister’s prerogative to deny this child her humanity. What your sister went through is her story, absolutely, and no one else’s. But her secret is a human being. And people are not secrets that anyone gets to keep. No amount of shame and no claim to control allow her to deny someone’s existence.

These are two independent points, the scientific phenomenon of accessible DNA testing and the moral hazard of hiding a person from her family. There’s a third matter at play here, too, in who gets to decide what is helpful to someone else. I don’t disagree that the truth could set your sister, mom and niece free in profound ways — but it is simply not your place to decide that for them, or use that potential to justify forcing the issue.

Your best approach to your sister is one that accounts for all these separate, relevant issues and boundaries. So, again: Speak to her of the stakes, frankly and with love. Let her know you will not participate indefinitely in the denial of this person her rightful connections. (And yours.) Give her a respectful amount of time with a firm end-by date.