In yet another installment of Spit, iHeartRadio's newest podcast presented by 23andMe, where musicians open up about their DNA test results with host Baratunde Thurston, Melissa Etheridge dives into the structure of her own family.
During the 40-minute conversation, Etheridge was also joined by filmmaker Sara Lamm, who discovered that she was conceived by a sperm donor at the age of 29, making the rock star's narrative all that much more interesting to talk about simultaneously, considering she is the mother of four children conceived by two different sperm donors.
"It makes my two oldest children, it makes their lives, when people say, 'Tell me about your family,'" the rock veteran admitted. "They're like, 'Oh, really, you want to know this? 'cause it's a long story.' They do know. They do know who their father is. Then the other two with the second baby mama, we didn't want another parental. Because they're 11-year-old twins, and they don't think about dad at all. They are so clear that. It was a donor and he was Swedish, blond hair, blue-eyed, they just know that. It's fine, they're not looking for that. They've got so many parents. They've got two sets of parents, and they're full with that. That might change later, but not now."
Meanwhile, Lamm said that if she knew of the story behind her biological father when she was younger, things would have turned out differently for her. "It was a full turning upside down of what I thought I knew and things that I thought were one hundred percent solid were no longer so solid," she confessed. "Because the people who were using sperm donors in the 1970s, and there were a lot more of them than people realized, but all the doctors were telling them never to tell anyone, never to tell the offspring and certainly never to tell their relatives," adding, "My mother didn't tell her sisters with whom she was very close. She told almost nobody."
Etheridge was quick to join in on the particular topic, saying, "I think if you're raised with that, it's not an issue. But, man, to pull that on you and not to know, that must be hard."
When it comes to how donor-conceived circles operate, Etheridge said that there isn't much shame in the LGBTQ community. "I think we're going through this on a worldwide thing, this sort of blood idea, of blood and family, and mine and my tribe, and how that's being blown apart by stuff like this. The truth is family is family. You can make family. Family is love, that's the bond we have. Blood is a whole nother story. It's interesting, it's great, but it's a whole thing."
Lamm's 2017 documentary, Thank You For Coming, sees the filmmaker unravel her trek from Hawaii to North Carolina, chasing nonexistent medical records and even forging a bond with a possible sister. "One of the things that I get asked a lot as I take out the film and screen it, is like, 'What kind of letter did you write to your bio dad to say hello? It's me,' she recalled. "How do you construct something like that? One of the things that I frequently find myself saying is, number one, you have to front-load it with all your best characteristics."
Listen back to the full interview above to hear more from Etheridge's sit-down, where the singer dished even more on her family and answers a big question: "Is it appropriate or even essential to invite your DNA cousins to the family reunion?"
Spit is an iHeartRadio podcast with 23andMe where we sit down with the most interesting cultural influencers of our time to explore how DNA testing gives us a new perspective on who we are and how we are all connected. Enjoy this episode? Subscribe, rate and review Spit on iTunes. Spitis brought to you 23 and Me.
Find out more about our host Baratunde Thurston at Baratunde.com or sign up for his text messages at 202-902-7949. You can also share your thoughts with Melissa Etheridge @metheridge.
Photo: Matt Eisman for iHeartRadio