Recently, this 35-year-old woman discovered that her father, 63, isn’t her biological father.
Her parents got married in 1983, and since they were so young at the time, she assumes that they weren’t truly in a place for that serious of a step.
For Christmas in 2018, she and her family received 23 and Me DNA kits as a gift.
“I got the results in 2019, but nothing crazy was revealed. I was matched immediately with my mom but had a big question mark for Dad. I thought it was weird that my dad didn’t come up, but when I questioned my parents about it, my mom, 57, said it was because my dad had his profile blocked,” she said.
Since she had no idea how the DNA kit worked, she thought this explanation was valid.
Because her father doesn’t know too much about technology, her mother is in charge of both her account as well as his.
After her mother told her this, she moved on and didn’t bring up the subject again.
She didn’t look at her 23 and Me account after 2019.
However, this past August, on her 35th birthday, she was going through her social media email account and deleting emails.
It was then that she saw she had a notification from 23 and Me telling her that a second cousin of hers was requesting to connect.
“I logged on and saw 20 new notifications of DNA matches and messages going back to 2021. I clicked on it and sorted all matches by the strength of relation, and, boom, I found out I have a half-brother. Apparently, he had reached out to me the year prior,” she explained.
At first, she assumed this half-brother, John, was a child her father had outside of his marriage to her mother.
Throughout her entire life, her mother persuaded her and her siblings to believe that her father had been unfaithful to her and told them that it was possible that he had children with other women.
Despite the fact that it was stunning to discover she had a half-brother she’d never previously known about, it had never been completely out of the realm of possibility.
After she connected with John, they started messaging each other.
“John disclosed to me that he grew up with his biological father. Confused, I started digging deeper into my DNA matches. I found lots of family I shared with John, but none were familiar to me,” she shared.
For the next month, her parents were traveling, and after that, they had a ton of family birthday celebrations, so she didn’t have the opportunity to have a private talk with her mother until just recently.
When she did finally discuss everything, her mother revealed that she had been unfaithful to her father, adding that she didn’t think anything major happened throughout any of these hookups with other men.
Her mother told her that her father wasn’t aware that she’d been unfaithful to him.
When she asked her mother about her biological father, she said that because of her job, she was introduced to tons of different people, so whatever relationship she’d had with him hadn’t been serious.
According to her mother, she was going after these men to seek attention and validation from them.
As the conversation progressed, she asked her mother if her 37-year-old father was her father’s biological daughter.
In response, her mother said she didn’t know who her daughter’s father was, so she wasn’t positive that the two of them had the same biological father.
Understandably, all of this has left her feeling conflicted and shattered.
She loves her father so much, and she acknowledges that if he found out that he wasn’t her biological father, he would be absolutely devastated.
Later, her mother asked her where she wanted to go from here.
Her mother brought up the option of sharing the news publicly if she was comfortable doing so, and she pointed out that this would hurt a lot of people.
Now, she’s upset that her mother put her in this situation in the first place.
She expressed that she wanted some space to process everything, telling her mother that it was up to her, both when and how her father, younger sister, 30, and younger brother, 29, would learn the news.
Then, she told her mother that she was planning to keep communicating with her half-siblings.
In her view, her father has the right to know the truth.
However, she’s terrified that this would cause their family to fall apart.
Even though she told her mother that it was her responsibility to choose how or when to inform her father about this, she feels terrible that she didn’t tell her father immediately after she found out he wasn’t her biological father.
After discovering all of these family secrets, she doesn’t know what to do from here.
What advice would you give her?
You can read the original post on Reddit here.
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