'AITA for calling my husband a controlling psycho in front of his family?'
"AITA for calling my husband a controlling psycho in front of his family?"
I called my husband a controlling psycho in front of his entire family because he asked for a DNA test, and three months later he has full custody of our daughter while I'm explaining to a judge why I shouldn't pay child support for a kid that isn't even his. The worst part? I did it to myself.
My husband and I had been together for six years. He worked in finance, traveled constantly for work, and I managed a small marketing firm. We'd been trying for a baby for two years before I finally got pregnant. He was over the moon. I was terrified. Not because of the pregnancy itself. Because I'd been sleeping with my intern for four months.
The intern was 24, fresh out of college, and treated me like I was some kind of goddess. My husband was always tired, always on his phone with clients, always somewhere else even when he was home. The intern listened. He laughed at my jokes. He made me feel like I was still someone worth paying attention to.
I convinced myself it was fine. I'd end it after the baby came. My husband would never know. Then at my baby shower, his mother pulled me aside. She had this strange look on her face. "You know, the baby doesn't really look like our side of the family in the ultrasound photos," she said.
I laughed it off. But she kept pushing. She started making comments about how my husband had been gone so much, how she'd heard about women who got pregnant with other men's babies. She never said it outright, but the implication was clear. She thought I'd cheated. I was furious. How dare she accuse me of something like that, even if it was true? So I went on the offensive.
Two weeks later, my husband came home from a business trip. He sat me down in the kitchen and said he wanted to talk.
"I've been thinking about what my mom said," he started.
"Your mom is insane," I cut him off.
"Just hear me out. I know this sounds crazy, but I want to get a DNA test after the baby is born. Just to be sure."
I lost it. I started screaming about how he didn't trust me, how his mother had poisoned his mind, how he was a controlling psycho who wanted to police my body. I told him if he didn't trust me, we shouldn't be together.
He just sat there, calm, watching me spiral.
"So you're saying no to the test," he said quietly.
"I'm saying you're an AH for asking."
The next family dinner, I made sure everyone knew what he'd done. I stood up in the middle of dessert and announced that my husband wanted a DNA test because he didn't trust me. His mother tried to defend him. His sister looked uncomfortable. His dad just stared at his plate.
"He's a controlling psycho," I said, loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear. "He thinks he can just demand a DNA test like I'm some kind of criminal."
My husband paid the bill in silence and drove us home without saying a word. I thought I'd won. I thought I'd shut down the DNA test conversation for good. Then I gave birth. Beautiful baby girl. My husband was there, holding my hand, crying when she came out. For a moment, I almost believed everything would be okay.
The intern showed up at the hospital. He said he wanted to "check on me" since I'd been out of the office. My husband was in the cafeteria getting food. The intern held the baby and got this weird look on his face.
"She has my nose," he said.
I told him to leave. He didn't.
My husband came back and found the intern holding our daughter. He asked who he was. I said he was just an employee. But the intern, stupid kid that he was, got nervous and said something about how beautiful "our" baby was.
My husband's face went blank.
"Our?" he repeated.
The intern panicked and left. My husband stood there, staring at the baby, then at me.
"I want the DNA test," he said.
I tried to argue. I tried to cry. I tried to say the intern was just being weird. But my husband had already made up his mind. He called a lawyer right there in the hospital room. The test came back three weeks later. Not his kid. My daughter, the baby I'd carried for nine months, wasn't his.
He filed for divorce immediately. But here's the thing, in our state, if you're married when the baby is born, the husband is legally presumed to be the father unless proven otherwise. My husband had proof. He wasn't the father. But he'd been acting as her father, signing the birth certificate, taking paternity leave.
His lawyer argued that since I'd committed fraud, he shouldn't be responsible for child support. My lawyer argued that he'd accepted paternity. Then my husband did something I never expected. He filed for full custody.
"You cheated on me, lied to me, tried to trap me into raising another man's child, and publicly humiliated me in front of my family," he told the judge. "I don't trust her to make good decisions for this child."
I laughed. I actually laughed in court. "She's not even your kid. Why do you want her?"
He looked at me like I was a stranger. "Because she's an innocent baby who deserves better than you."
The judge awarded him primary custody. I got supervised visitation every other weekend. And because he'd taken on the paternal role, the judge ordered me to pay child support to him for a baby that wasn't even his biologically.
The intern? He signed away his rights the second my lawyer contacted him. Wanted nothing to do with either of us. My family won't talk to me. My friends stopped calling. My business partner bought me out because the scandal was affecting clients.
I'm sitting in a studio apartment I can barely afford, paying child support to my ex husband for a baby I can't even see unsupervised, all because I called him a controlling psycho for wanting the one thing that would have exposed the truth anyway. So AITA for destroying my own life by trying to manipulate my husband into raising another man's kid?