Rock My World

I just got off a Skype conference call with my brother in Geneva and sister in Boston. My brother had insisted that he needed to talk to the two of us, email wouldn't do. My sister and I had been speculating about what the mystery was, and were somewhat aggravated that he wouldn't just tell us in an email.

Now I know why.

I have a nephew.

That may not surprise you, because you may not know that I have always only had a niece, who is 35 years old, my sister's daughter.

Today I learned I have a 24-year-old nephew, a young man who lives in Brazil and does not (yet) know that my brother is his father. My brother only learned about him recently, and the DNA tests only just confirmed it. The young man was conceived when my brother was at Oxford (at roughly the same time I was in England, at Cambridge), and his mother left the country and married shortly thereafter. Although she suspected the child was my brother's, she never told her husband. Apparently they have recently divorced, and the mother is trying to figure out if and how to tell her son about his biological father.

I've seen a photograph. The resemblance is uncannily obvious. I mean, the DNA test was hardly necessary. Isn't genetics an amazing thing?

The most surprising thing, for me, is how delighted I am by this. I will never have children, but now there's one more person out there closely connected to me by biological bonds.

Of course the story is only beginning. It's fraught with potential emotional landmines for my brother, who has always loved and wanted children, but who has known for some time that he won't be able to have them with his wife. He is already wistful that he never had a chance to know his son as a child. My heart goes out to the young man whose world will be turned upside down when he learns about this (not to mention the distress and confusion his father and brother will likely feel as well). Who knows whether any of us will have any real relationship with him...

It's an astonishing development. The world is filled with surprise.