Some Doors Wait for You. Some You Break Down

What I learned when life handed me the key I didn’t know I was waiting for.

We love a good door metaphor. Writers, therapists, self-help influencers. Open one, close one, walk through one into your destiny. At this point I’m pretty sure there’s a rule requiring at least one door whenever anyone writes about a major life change.

Unfortunately, mine came with an actual one.

In my twenties, I donated eggs anonymously. I was told I would never know whether children resulted from those donations, and they would never know me. That was the arrangement. I accepted it, put that part of my life where we put things we believe are finished, and moved on.

Then, in 2023, my biological daughter found me.

I won’t tell the whole story here, partly because it isn’t mine alone to tell and partly because I’m still figuring out what telling it responsibly even looks like. But meeting her changed far more than my understanding of biology. It made me reconsider things I had treated as settled: identity, motherhood, family, and some of the stories I had been telling myself about my own life for years.

That was disorienting enough. Then something else happened. I began wondering whether I should write about it.

There is a strange difference between living through something extraordinary and deciding it might become a story other people are allowed to enter. The first belongs to your life. The second requires choices. What do you tell? What stays private? Which parts belong to you, and which parts only intersect with you because someone else lived them too?

As a fiction writer, I am used to owning the whole world. I can rearrange the furniture, change the timeline, give someone a better motive, or delete an inconvenient person entirely. Real people object to this kind of editing. And this story has real people everywhere.

For a long time, I thought the most remarkable part was simply that my daughter and I found each other. An anonymous egg donation, a DNA test decades later, and two lives that were never expected to meet suddenly occupying the same room. That alone would have been enough. It wasn’t the whole story.

Finding each other changed the way I understood the years before it. It also changed the years after. I had spent much of my life believing I knew which chapters were closed and which versions of myself were already explained. Then one message arrived and made some of those explanations feel considerably less permanent.

Writers are annoying this way. Give us one destabilizing event, and eventually we start wondering what it means.

Around the same time, I was writing The Helix Chronicles, books full of questions about identity, biology, technology, and what happens when human beings decide they can control outcomes that are considerably more complicated than they expected.

I used to think the origin of those books was mostly intellectual curiosity. I’m not so sure anymore.

The science still fascinates me. But beneath all the CRISPR, AI, biotech conspiracies, and people making catastrophically confident decisions about other people’s lives, I keep circling the same questions: How much of us is biology? How much is history? Who gets to decide what family means? What happens when something you believed was fixed turns out to be anything but?

Apparently my fiction had been asking versions of those questions before I was ready to ask them about myself.

I don’t know exactly what form this story will eventually take. I have notes, memories, pieces of it I understand and others I’m still reluctant to put into sentences. I also have a daughter whose life intersects with mine in ways that make patience more important than my urge to organize everything into chapters.

So the door is open. There. I used it again.

For now, that’s enough.