I met my redneck dad. His family, too.

He’d remarried.

Picked up two step kids in the process. And, for a few months, we did the every-other-weekend thing.

If he was working, I’d come along. Sleeping in the back cab of a semi, watching the middle-U.S.A. whiz past our enormous windshield, was amazing to five-year-old me.

I tried understanding what it meant to have a dad. To be a son. Opening myself up to loving this person. Hell, just this week we’d spun donuts in his ’79 Chevelle, and last week, we were complete strangers! It felt like anything could happen.

One weekend he called. There was absolutely no need to meet him halfway, he said. He was coming to town. And couldn’t wait to have Tyler for the weekend.

I packed my little backpack and walked to the end of our drive. I sang to myself. I thought about all the Smurf episodes I was going to watch. I tried out a new word I’d been practicing. “I’m gonna ride bikes with dad!” “I’m gonna feel funny about the mom on “Married…with Children” with dad!”

But I didn’t notice the look on my mom’s face when I looked back at her standing in the window. The look of a mother’s heart breaking at what her “Sensitive Child” was about to endure. I only waved.

He never came. And we didn’t hear from him again that night, or for the next twenty- seven years.

***

The funny thing about DNA tests, what they don’t tell you at checkout, is that they never end.

A year later, I got an email. They improved their technology, it said. And, as a result, some of my results could’ve changed.

The claims I’d been making to anyone who would listen immediately became bogus. Norway vanished. And was replaced with Germany. Hoping to scatter my gloomy mood, I reminded myself, I always have been into self-deprecation and sausage.

***

The term “ambiguous loss” was first used in the late 1970’s by Pauline Boss, a researcher studying families of soldiers who went missing in action. It’s common in those maneuvering adoption, especially if moved house to house, family to family, over several years.

Unanswerable questions like, “Am I still a sister? Am I still this person’s daughter?” linger. And because ambiguous loss isn’t acknowledged like other forms of loss, those who suffer have no rituals to find closure. I have two people in my life—a father and brother—who aren’t physically there, yet exist psychologically.

Am I a brother?

A son?

I’ve designed mental barriers to cope. For decades, steering conversations away from family. I’m embarrassed to admit, but multiple times, I’ve denied having siblings.

I’ve hoped to forget the past, while not allowing myself to believe in certainty about the future, either. And existing in this bubble designed to minimize shame, pain, or inadequacy, makes it difficult to retain memories. Even those I want to keep.

I’ve forgotten the names of people I spent months or even years hanging out with, remembering the name of a woman I slept with only after she friended me on Facebook years later.

I can’t even see the face of my first kissed.