After Denise Coberley brings up her doubt in the Bible to her adoptive religious parents, she finds herself on a journey of self-discovery.
Denise Coberley has been a science educator for twenty-three years. She is now pursuing a Master’s in Science Communication with a minor in Linguistics and Neuroscience. Her acceptance to the graduate program at Greenlee School of Journalism at Iowa State University allowed her to reconnect with her academic roots. Coberley’s goal is to understand how people react and develop science identities and opinions based on their interactions with media, including social, print, and news. Her husband, who works at ISU, and her children, who attend ISU, are her biggest cheerleaders.
This story originally aired on February 15, 2019 in an episode titled “Heredity.”
Story Transcript
I was born in a small, conservative, religious town out in Western Kansas and, by religious, I mean there were five churches for 900 people. We are the belt buckle of the Bible Belt, and I didn’t fit in.
When I was little, I remember going to family events, family reunions and we would always run into someone who hadn’t seen our family in a while and the conversation it always goes something like this.
They’d see my little brother. “You're a spitting image of your father at that age.” They’d see my little sister. “You look just like your mother.” And then they’d see me. “Oh, you must be the adopted one.”
Now, it wasn’t like being adopted was a bad thing. My parents never ever made me feel like it was a bad thing but I didn’t look like them and I didn’t look at the world like them either. You see, I wanted explanations. I wanted to know why, so I asked questions.
“Mom, why do caterpillars turn into butterflies?”
My mom would say, “Because God made them that way.”
“Mom, why do we have rainbows?”
My mom, “Because of God’s promise to Noah.”
“Mom, why are boys different than girls?” That one got ignored entirely.
But those weren’t answers, they weren’t explanations and they didn’t tell me why.
Now, there was one place where I was starting to get some answers, at least most of the time. It was a small, conservative, religious town. And that was school.
I loved school. I could read all I wanted, I was learning math, I was learning history, I was learning science. It was awesome. Things really fell into place for me, though, my sophomore year of high school when I took biology and fell in love. I loved everything about it. Mitosis, respiration, photosynthesis, ecology, evolution, natural selection. It was the real stuff, not the biblical form that I'd been learning.
And I did, I loved it, but it also scared me because, you see, hell is a very real place to the people in my community, especially my parents. And evolution is a one-way ticket.
But I was convinced. The more I learned, the more it just made sense. So one day, I got up the courage.
We were sitting in the pickup. I looked at my mom, I took a deep breath and I said, “Mom, I don't believe the Bible. At least not all of it. And I don't think the earth is only 6,000 years old and evolution just makes more sense and I think it’s real."
My mom, without skipping a beat, looked at me and said, “You know, you're going to go to hell for thinking that.”
I learned two things that day. One, I realized I didn’t care if I went to hell anymore because biology was worth it. And, two, there were going to be things in my life that I wasn’t going to be able to share with my parents and there were going to be conversations that we just never were going to have.
I graduated from high school. I went to college and I majored in biology. The more I learned about evolution, about behavior, about genetics, about epigenetics, the more these questions kept coming up, questions that had always bothered me growing up. That was why was I so different? Why did my brain work so differently from everybody else? Why couldn’t I just accept what my parents had told me?
I was pretty sure I was never going to get that answer. I was born in a closed adoption state, which means I have no access to records. And my birth parents, well, that was one of those topics that fell under the category of we never talked about it, so those questions just hung there.
They hung there as I got married, as I graduated from college. Yes, I did it in that order. They hung there as I became a high school science teacher, biology. And they hung there as I had my own kids.
Now, if you know a science geek, you know that having a question you can’t answer is like having an itch you can’t scratch. My husband knew that and so about two years ago, for my birthday, he decided to help me scratch that itch, at least a little bit. He got me an Ancestry.com kit. So I spit in the tube, I sent it off and I waited for my results.
I got my pie chart back and I was mostly Northern European with a whole bunch of other stuff thrown in there. But what I didn’t know about Ancestry.com and what my husband didn’t know is that Ancestry.com matches you with other people that have sent their DNA in. And I had matches. I had people out there that had the same genes that I did. And one of those matches messaged me.
She was a high probability second or third cousin. She says, “Hey, I’m doing this genealogy and I was wondering what can you tell me about your side of the family.”
So I message back. “Absolutely nothing.” I apologized and said, “I’m adopted. I really am sorry.”
So she messaged me back and she said, “Really? Well, tell me what you know. Maybe I can help.”
Well, I didn’t know much. Remember, this is a topic that we didn’t talk about. But I did know my birthday, obviously, and I knew what hospital I'd been born in. So I sent off the message and figured that was that. Until I got the next message.
When I opened the message, I read seven of the most powerful words I've ever read in any order in my entire life. “I think I found your birth mother.”
It went on to say that she wanted to talk. Here was her phone number. Here was her email. And I could contact her if I wanted to. At that moment when I was about to have all those questions answered, I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t told my parents anything. And I love my parents and my parents love me, but I didn’t want to hurt them. I had no idea how they would react. I figured this was just going to be one of those things that we just never talked about.
but the guilty child in me won and I called my mom on a drive home one day and I just said, “Mom, I think I found my birth mother.”
Silence. You know that silence where you're pretty sure a nuclear bomb is about to go off?
But she surprised me. She just said, “I’m happy for you.”
Now, we've never spoke of it since but at least I felt like I had permission. I also wasn’t sure because what if my birth mother was exactly like my parents? What if she wasn’t like me at all, and I was never going to get any of these answers?
So I did what anybody does in this day and age when you want to try and find out something about someone. I Facebook stalked her. And when I opened up her Facebook page, my faith in science was renewed. I was her. She was me. The same politics - who knew that was genetic - the same love of reading, the same love of science, it was all there.
Then I opened her photos and I scrawled through and I found a picture of her when she was about 35. For the first time, I knew what it was like to have someone say, “You look just like your mother.”
So I messaged her and I said, “Well, it looks like you're my mom.”
Thank you.