Editor’s Note: The following essay was originally published by Bethany Fraser on The Adoptee Diaries and is republished here with permission.
On losing the father who raised me, finding the father whose DNA I carry, and learning to hold love, anger, and truth at the same time.
By Bethany Fraser
Host of The Adoptee Diaries, marketing strategist, and adoptee advocate
I wrote this before Father’s Day and couldn’t bring myself to hit publish. Maybe because sharing something this personal still feels scary. Maybe because life got busy. Maybe because I worried about saying the wrong thing. But this morning I woke up with a pit in my stomach and a strong sense that someone else might need to know they’re not alone in this today. So I’m sharing it now.
Father’s Day has never been a simple holiday for me.
It can’t be.
Not as an adoptee. Not as a woman who has loved one father her whole life, found another father in adulthood, and had to make peace with the fact that both of those relationships carry love, loss, and unanswered questions of their own.
For some people, Father’s Day is brunch reservations, backyard grills, framed photos, and a quick social media tribute before the day moves on. For many in the adoption constellation, it can be all of that too. But it can also be something else entirely: grief, gratitude, anger, longing, tenderness, confusion, memory, reunion, silence, and the ache of what was never fully said. Sometimes all at once.
That is the truth I’ve come to respect. Family is not always neat. Fatherhood is not always simple. And love, even when it is real and lasting, does not erase complexity.
When I think about Father’s Day, I think first of the man who raised me.
I have core memories of being a little girl sprawled out on the living room floor near our stereo after my adoptive father came home from a long day at work. The kind of tired that lived in his shoulders but never kept him from being present. Music was part of the rhythm of our home. Billy Joel. Creedence Clearwater Revival. Oldies from the 50s and 60s. Songs I still hear now and immediately feel in my body. I can still picture the room. The carpet beneath me. The sound filling the house. The comfort of being little and safe and near him.
He was my volleyball coach. My cheerleader. My protector.
He was the dad who showed up.
He was the one in the bleachers, the one driving me where I needed to go, the one believing in me, loving me in ways that felt steady and practical and deeply familiar. He danced with me at my wedding. He became the kind of grandfather my boys will carry with them forever—creative, crafty, playful, proud. The grandfather who built birdhouses with them. Who lit up when my oldest showed signs of being a math whiz. Who beamed over my youngest as he grew into a football player and honor student. He delighted in them. He made things with his hands. He loved in action.
He passed away four years ago, and yet he is still with me.
He’s there in the cardinals that seem to appear when I need them most. In the glistening water off the lake. In the song that comes on the radio at exactly the moment I’m at my wit’s end, stressed, overwhelmed, and missing him without even saying it out loud. He is still woven into the ordinary moments of my life in a way that feels both gentle and undeniable. Grief has changed shape over time, but it has never left. Neither has love.
And still, there is another truth.
After my father passed away, I learned something that stopped me in my tracks: he had known from the moment he adopted me that I was biracial.
He knew.
And he chose never to confirm it for me.
Not when I asked as a child. Not when I asked as a teenager. Not when I asked as an adult, trying to understand myself more fully and make sense of the body I lived in, the questions I carried, the things I felt but could not prove. Over and over, from childhood through adulthood, I asked. And over and over, the truth remained just out of reach.
That kind of revelation does something to a person.
It doesn’t erase the love. It doesn’t erase the years of showing up, of coaching, protecting, building, dancing, fathering, and grandfathering with real devotion. But it changes the texture of grief. It asks you to revisit the story you thought you knew. It makes room for anger where there had only been sadness. It introduces betrayal into a relationship you still hold sacred. It leaves you standing in the wreckage of two truths that do not cancel each other out.
He loved me.
And he withheld the truth.
Both are true.
Around the same time my adoptive father’s health was declining, I reconnected with my birth father.
That reunion carries its own weight in this story, and its own layer of secrecy. Because while I was searching for answers and piecing together my biological history—while I was spitting into a tube and waiting for DNA to tell me what my body had known before my paperwork ever did—I kept that from my dad too.
I didn’t tell him about the reunion.
I didn’t tell him my biracial identity had been confirmed.
I didn’t tell him that pieces of me I had spent a lifetime trying to name were finally beginning to make sense.
I have lived with that choice too.
Had I told him, if he had been cognitively clear enough by then, would he have come clean? Would he have finally said the words I had spent years waiting to hear? Would we have had the conversation that never came? Or would the silence have remained, one more unfinished thing between us?
I don’t know.
And that not-knowing is its own kind of grief.
So while I was losing the man who raised me, I was also meeting the man whose DNA I carry. While I was trying to say goodbye to one father, I was trying to make space for another. While I was grieving, I was also gathering information, stories, fragments of history, and pieces of myself that had been scattered for decades. I was trying to understand my birth father’s story even as I was angry with my adoptive father’s choices. I was making room for tenderness and rage at the same time.
Complicated doesn’t begin to cover it.
This is the part of adoption that many people don’t see. Or maybe don’t want to see. We still live in a culture that likes its family stories clean and easy. We like tidy narratives and grateful adoptee scripts and holidays that fit neatly into a card aisle. But adoption is rarely neat. Family is rarely simple. And Father’s Day, for people like me, can sit in the space between devotion and disappointment, loyalty and truth, grief and gratitude, history and healing.
I can miss my dad with every fiber of my being and still be furious that he let me question myself for so long.
I can be deeply grateful for the man who raised me and still grieve what his silence cost me.
I can honor my birth father’s role in my story and still mourn the years we lost.
I can hold love for both men without pretending either relationship was uncomplicated.
That is not betrayal. That is honesty.
And honesty, I’ve learned, is the only thing that has ever moved me toward healing.
I did not get here alone. I got here through support, through love, through professional help, through adoption-competent therapy and counsel, through doing the slow and often painful work of letting multiple truths exist at once without forcing them to compete. I got here by allowing myself to stop choosing between one father and another, one truth and another, one version of myself and another.
I got here by understanding that being whole does not mean being untouched. It does not mean every question is answered or every wound is closed. It means I no longer need to deny parts of my story in order to survive it. It means I can look at the fullness of it—the beauty, the betrayal, the devotion, the secrecy, the grief, the reunion, the identity, the love—and still call myself healed enough to keep going.
That healing has changed how I show up in my life.
It has changed how I mother.
How I love.
How I tell the truth.
How I advocate.
How I talk to adoptive parents and adoptees and anyone who loves someone touched by adoption.
Because this is what I know now: children do not need perfection from the adults who love them. They need truth. They need room for their questions. They need caregivers who understand that identity is not a threat to attachment, that biology is not the enemy of belonging, and that withholding information in the name of protection can become its own kind of harm.
And they need space to love all the people who are part of their story.
That is what I think about on Father’s Day now. Not just the cards and cookouts and public tributes, but the private work of making room. Making room for adoptive fathers who showed up and loved hard. Making room for birth fathers whose stories are too often erased, minimized, misunderstood, or left out entirely. Making room for foster fathers, kinship caregivers, stepfathers, grandfathers, mentors, cradle care providers, and father figures who have shaped children’s lives in ways both big and small. Making room for adoptees who are trying to honor one father while searching for another. Making room for grief that doesn’t behave. For anger that arrives late. For gratitude that survives anyway.
Fatherhood in the adoption constellation is not one thing.
Sometimes it looks like a dad coming home from work and turning on Billy Joel while his daughter lies on the living room floor nearby, content just to be close to him.
Sometimes it looks like a man building birdhouses with his grandsons and swelling with pride over their gifts and accomplishments.
Sometimes it looks like a reunion years too late, a DNA match, a story finally told, a face that reflects your own.
Sometimes it looks like silence. Sometimes absence. Sometimes longing. Sometimes repair.
Sometimes it looks like all of it at once.
So to my adoptive father: thank you for the life you gave me, the safety you offered, the ways you showed up, the love you poured into me and into my boys. Thank you for the music, the coaching, the protection, the laughter, the birdhouses, the wedding dance, the parts of you that remain stitched into my everyday life. I miss you. I carry you. I still look for you in cardinals and songs and sunlight on water.
And to my birth father: thank you for the pieces of myself I have come to know through you. Thank you for your story, for the truth you have shared, for the way your presence has helped me understand where I come from. Thank you for giving me another way to see myself more clearly.
To both of you, in all your humanity and imperfection, in all the ways you have shaped me: this Father’s Day, I choose to bring the best of you both into my life.
That is what fatherhood means to me now.
Not perfection.
Not a Hallmark version of family.
Not a tidy, singular story.
But the willingness to tell the truth.
The courage to hold complexity.
The grace to make room for grief and gratitude in the same breath.
And the kind of love that, even when imperfect, still leaves a mark.
For those of us in the adoption constellation, Father’s Day can hold many things. Celebration. Loss. Anger. Tenderness. Reunion. Distance. Memory. Relief. Questions. Hope.
All of it belongs.
And so do we.
About the Author
Bethany Fraser is a writer, speaker, marketing strategist, and the host of The Adoptee Diaries, where she explores identity, belonging, grief, truth, and healing through the lens of adoptee experience. A biracial adoptee, Bethany is passionate about honest storytelling and creating space for deeper conversations across the adoption constellation.