'I think I just found out I have a son. Should/how do I approach his mother?' + UPDATE
"I think I just found out I have a son. Should/how do I approach his mother?"
So my world has been turned upside down over the last 24 hours. I've got two kids (8 and 2), or so I thought. My oldest has an assignment for school to write a report on an interesting relative. My family is boring, but I did recall having a great-great-great grand uncle who was a member of Congress.
So I thought we'd start there. I logged in to Ancestry and had a notification "You and [random woman's name] share DNA". Thought it was probably a distant cousin or something.
Clicked it. It said predicted relationship "parent/child". I called my mom to make sure her account didn't get hacked since I knew she had it done. She said she used 23andMe for her testing.
So I looked up this woman on Facebook. Came to the realization that this was someone I hooked up with in college (I used TruthFinder to find out more about her). She appears to be married and has a husband, an older kid, and two younger kids.
They look like the typical suburban family. The older kid looks like as awkward as I did as a teenager. Spitting image. I'm guessing she did a test for him using her name.
I have a flood of emotions right now. Anger being the first. If my math is right, he's around 18 (don't remember the exact timing) and I've missed out on basically his entire childhood.
I was absolutely in no place to raise a kid at that time in my life and probably wouldn't have ended up being able to go to med school. At the same time, I never got the choice to know and that's what upsets me more. I know my family would've helped me out.
I haven't told anyone this; not even my spouse. I'm wrestling with guilt. I really want to reach out. I don't want to throw turmoil into a family, but I also feel like I shouldn't have to miss out on more of his life.
He has an Instagram account but it's private and reaching out straight to him would be overwhelming not to mention creepy. Where do I start? Do I call Ancestry? Reach out to her directly? Do I get a lawyer? I don't even know how that works because I live abroad now. Thanks in advance.
Here were the top rated comments from readers in response to the OP's post:
Firstly I would speak to my partner and then from there I would contact the women and say what you have found, she has put his DNA on a site that matches people so it seems she wants people to know. But yeah first things first talk to you partner.
I doubt she did it so that he finds out lol she could’ve just told him he was pregnant to begin with. Her son probably just did a DNA test.
I agree you should contact her. Remember she can see the match too so she may reach out herself. Don't start out angry, she may not have known who the father was - it was college, you weren't in a relationship after all.
I would discuss it with your spouse first and foremost, so you two can navigate it together. They are your life partner and would be crushed if you didn’t tell them first. I would then reach out to their mom and go from there.
The one thing you shouldn't do is speak with the boy. He may not even know he is not the son of the man raising him. Let your wife know what you've discovered, then immediately see a therapist to discuss this with.
Fifteen days later, the OP returned with an update.
Update due to popular demand: The day after my original post, I told my spouse and my parents. Both supportive of however I wanted to go about this. I went ahead and decided to contact my son’s mother.
I didn’t want to give her the excuse that I was anything but proactive. When I went to send a message directly on Ancestry, I could no longer find the match. She had blocked me. My sister, who also used Ancestry but hadn’t opened the app in ages, could still see the relation from hers.
I decided to have my sister contact her, thinking it may be easier anyway coming from a woman and someone slightly less emotionally involved. Sister was blocked immediately, with no response. We both tried reaching out on Facebook. Blocked and blocked. My mom tried reaching out. Blocked.
So I wrote a brief message to my son and sent it to his Instagram. Without going into specifics, simply telling him that I think we share a connection, that I knew his mother when we were in college in 2006, and leaving the door open from there. Basically telling him I was likely his father without blatantly saying it. Let him put the pieces together in a way that made sense for him.
Within a few hours, I received a message back. He knew exactly what I meant. He said that his mom told him his biological father was her high school sweetheart and was killed by a drunk driver while she was pregnant.
He didn’t know his mom had gone to college. He told me he had started questioning the story because she didn’t know any of his relatives and only had one pic of his “dad”, and had no pics of her with this guy.
He described this as a “big question mark in my life” and that he had been wanting answers to for a while. He did provide the DNA for the Ancestry test. His mom told him it was to help her locate the (fictional) father’s family so they could come to his graduation party.
Still, he said that he wanted to be 100% sure that I was who I said I was. So on the 6th, I drove down five hours to meet him at a Starbucks. I brought a paternity test. We did the samples and put it in the mail. The results came back yesterday as a match.
I knew from the moment I saw him that he’s my kid. A parent knows. On the photos I saw of him, he looked like me as a teenager. But when I saw him in person, I could see the resemblance to my dad as a young man.
His voice even sounded like mine. It was tough holding myself together. It was the same flood of emotion I had when I saw my kids for the first time when they were born — a unique cocktail of emotions most parents know. Except now it’s happening in a Starbucks, and the kid is a teenager who’s 6’1” (same height as me too!).
As for his mother’s husband: My son told me he’s never had a close relationship with him, especially after his twin brothers were born (they’re 7). His mom is good to him and clearly did well raising him. He said he’s always looked to his grandpa as his father figure, as he lived with his mom and her parents for the first several years of his life.
He doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life yet, but he’s an honors student, on the swim team, and is hoping to get a scholarship for swimming. He has a girlfriend and is going to prom this spring. I’m so incredibly proud of how maturely he’s handled all of this.
We’re keeping in contact on Instagram and agreed to meet this summer so he can meet the rest of the family, particularly my parents. He’s especially excited to meet my 2-year-old daughter. He says he always wanted a little sister.
I also encouraged him to go easy on his mom when the time comes to tell her because we were both so young when all this happened, and I’m sure she did the best she could do at the time as misguided as it may have been.
Sometimes adults tell lies to make things easier for kids to accept, and we can suddenly find ourselves caught up in those lies. It doesn’t mean she wanted to lie to him.
So all in all, a mixed ending. Would I have liked for his mom to have complied? Yes. It would’ve made things a hell of a lot easier. But I won’t hold a grudge against his mom because my #1 priority is my son’s well-being and he doesn’t need chaos.
I hope when she’s finally told that she can come to terms with it, because they both deserve peace and he shouldn’t have an unspoken rift between his parents. I think she will. She doesn’t have much of a choice at this point. I hope now she understands that now that he’s grown, I’m not trying to take him away from her.
In some ways it’s a blessing I didn’t find out until now. Because had I found out sooner, lawyers and judges would’ve been involved and I don’t think that would’ve been good for him.
At least that’s what I tell myself when I get upset. And I’m glad both of us have gotten some closure here. Particularly him, as he’s been dealing with this a lot longer than I have.
Here were the top rated comments from readers in response to the OP's post:
Happy ending yay.
Wow. Twists and turns. I feel sad for your son. He was denied his father in his first 19 years despite him craving a father. But I find it comical the mother thought she could continue with the dead father lie. I can't believe she also lied about not going to college.
Wonder if the husband knows. It might hit the roof for her soon lol. I bet your boy would be thrilled to see you at one of his swim competitions. God speed to both of you as you try to catch up the stolen time.
Me thinks there is NO WAY this is close to concluded.
I have many thoughts, but I’ll limit myself to the fact that “Status: Concluded” is a mite optimistic. Things could yet get very messy.
18 years and his mom's learned absolutely nothing during that time. Quite selfish of her to attempt to block the communication. She has no right if her son is a legal adult. Just arse covering for her own lies. Glad they've made contact though. Hopefully they get to build a healthy relationship.
This happened to my cousin. He was in the Army and sometime after he returned from deployment, his wife announced she was pregnant and it was someone else’s. They divorced, he left her in Alaska, he relocated, remarried and went on to have two more children.
Then one day, he gets a message from a kid who matched on Ancestry with another cousin of ours and they provided his email. They did a DNA test and he is my cousin’s child, he is now 18 and free to have a relationship with my cousin, to his mother’s chagrin. I can’t lie that makes me happy.