... The answer was simple: no. Yet when I was 8, nothing could have prepared me for the news I was about to receive. I felt as if the world around me was crumbling, as if everything I had ever known was a lie, and that somehow, it was in reaction to me constantly asking about the validity of my parents being my biological parents. The biggest moment of my life was about to happen. My mother and her parents were seated at the kitchen table and told me they felt I was "grown-up enough to know" what they were about to tell me. I was excited, who doesn't love to know secrets? "Pop Pop's not your real grandfather," someone said flatly, with little emotion. I cried. The first thing that came to my mind and out of my mouth was "You're not my grandfather!" and it took several heroic acts on my mother's part to convince me that he was, even if not by blood. Hearing that everything I had ever taken as fact was a lie suddenly made me question things. What else had I been lied to about? I felt a complete sense of betrayal from my family because of this truth. I thought that I was the focus of some sadistic practical joke played by my family. My grandfather and I had been close, spending days together for the two of us to bond, doing things that would not be the same had I done them with any other person in my life. I felt as if I had been bonding with a stranger for the past 8 years. What made it worse was that I renounced my love for my grandfather, and immaturely reversed the last 8 years of my life. Not only was I hurt, but in turn, I hurt one of the most loved people in my life. Some 5 years later, my mother told me that Papa, her grandfather, was not biologically related to us either. Unlike most people, I had a close relationship with my great-grandfather. Even still, this was much easier for me to handle than finding out the same fact about my grandfather. Possibly because I had never been nearly as close to my great-grandfather as my grandfather, possibly because I was old enough to know that genetics did not make him love me any less, possibly because I had gone through the conversation once before. I had already learned that family was determined by love, not by blood, and occasionally water is thicker than blood. My family, for some unknown reason or another, felt that I needed to know this information. I never asked them why. I don't want to know why. ...
