Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

“I don’t want to be a presentist,” the author was saying. Presentism: the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. It would be easy to fall into such thinking. I had done so from the moment I discovered the truth of my identity. Those early months were taken up first with the disbelief that my parents could have ever knowingly participated in such a deceit, and then later with anger and sorrow that they had made the choices they did—even though those choices resulted in my existence. For a long while I was able to put myself in their shoes only as myself, product of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with all the biological, genetic, historical, and psychological tools available to me. But now I was coming to the awareness that my young parents-to-be had none of these tools. They possessed only their own fear, shame, despair, and desire for a child at any cost. They joined hands and went deeper into the wilderness until the only way out was through. There was no going back.

I often give advice to others (and to myself, as well!) that we can’t judge our past selves based on decisions we now think should have been made differently. We do the best we can with what we know, with what energy or willpower or awareness we have at the time. That past self cannot be judged or held liable for not doing better, because they did exactly what they were able to at the time.