I received this email from Claire expressing gratitude for writing An Unexpected Father-Daughter DNA Match. I am sharing it with her permission. If you’d like to share your experience or advice for other couples and families that discover an unknown biological daughter through a commercial DNA test, please email me at molly@fatherdaughterdnamatch.com.
Dear Molly ,
I am writing to you from the U.K., having read your book An Unexpected Father-Daughter DNA Match following discovering through Ancestry DNA that my husband had fathered a daughter 55 years ago of whom he was unaware. Not knowing how to deal with the shock we felt, I tried to find help and eventually found your book (too late). My husband had behaved in exactly the way you described, and it has led to much heartache for both of us.
My husband and I have been together for over 44 years and married for 43. He is aged 76, I am 73, and we are parents to four adult children who have all left home.
My husband and I had joked about the possibility of an NPE being flagged up but were shocked when it became a reality. We discussed what to do and agreed that he would wait to see if contact was made by her. Unbeknown to me, after doing a bit of research, he discovered she lived in Australia, where he had lived for 5 years, and got in touch with her. There were several exchanges between them before he told me she had been in contact. I read her e-mail and did not realise at first that my husband had initiated the contact. When I read their exchanges I was taken aback at the language my husband was using. Despite telling me he was curious but wasn’t sure if he wanted to pursue a relationship with her, he was telling her how excited he was and was very concerned about the impact the discovery had had on her, her family, and her mother. He had also given her enormous amounts of information about us and our family, together with our social media platforms, without discussing it with me. When I raised my concerns I was told I could either be part of it or not, as he was going to continue to converse with her. I felt extremely isolated and hurt; the pain was almost unbearable, and I felt the ground had shifted beneath my feet.
Our relationship began to suffer because he could not see why I couldn’t just accept bio daughter and see it as something positive in our lives. He told me that I was turning a situation that could be very pleasant into something unpleasant. We were at loggerheads. It was at this point I found your book and asked my husband to read it. Realisation dawned, and he expressed the opinion that he wished we had been aware of it at the outset.
After a lot of discussions, we continued conversing with her, giving her family photographs, medical histories on my husband’s side, his family history, etc. However, I still found their exchanges upsetting.
I am not unfeeling towards my husband’s bio daughter; I appreciate that for her, this has been a huge shock. When she approached her mother to question the DNA result her mother was as shocked as her daughter. Apparently, she was unaware that my husband is her daughter’s father as she had married another man just after their very short affair and assumed he was the father. Bio daughter was happy to be having the exchanges with my husband and told her immediate and wider family about my husband before we had told ours. We felt pushed into telling our children, and apart from them, one of my sisters and a very close friend have told no one else.
Our daughter was as shocked by the revelation as we were and was most upset to realise she was not her father’s only daughter and felt relegated to being his younger daughter. After a lot of discussion with her partner and us, she made the decision that she did not want any contact or relationship with her bio sister. She does not accept that she can be part of our family at any level, as they were not brought up together. She did not want any information about her shared with her bio sister – at 41 years old, she felt she had the right to determine whether personal information about her should be communicated. Our sons were less affected and took the attitude that it could happen to any one of them but showed no interest in their bio sister whatsoever. They
all took the attitude it was up to their father whether he brought his bio daughter into the family but did not give any thought to the possible consequences if this happened.
I have always been very empathetic with people who find themselves in the situation we all found ourselves in and have assisted two friends to make contact with their biological families. But due to historic occurrences in my life before I met my husband and despite making every effort to come to terms with this new relationship in our lives, I was unable to cope with the buried memories it aroused. I feel that had this discovery been made at the beginning of our relationship, I would have been more able to accept the relationship, however, after 44 years, to discover he had fathered a child with another woman, albeit before we met, has caused me so much turmoil.
From not being able to understand my antipathy towards his bio daughter, my husband gradually understood that this was having a profoundly disturbing effect on us and our marriage. He was sorry that his actions had caused me so much upset and anxiety but did not know how to fix it. I was so unhappy and near despair. I sought counseling and did a lot of research into this subject but finally understood that I needed to deal with my own ‘demons’ before I would be able to move on to acceptance of my husband’s relationship with or have any relationship with his bio daughter. The result is that he made the decision to stop contact with her by telling her their relationship was having a negative impact on his family and expressing regret that it hadn’t had a more joyful outcome. Unfortunately, again, he didn’t consult me before this, and had he done so, I might have counseled him to ask her to accept that the relationship they were developing be put on hold until he and I could resolve the issues caused by it.
My husband insists that he has no regrets about cutting contact with his bio daughter to try and restore equilibrium in our lives – as far as he is concerned, our relationship is the most important in his life, and there will never be any further contact with her. He wishes I could feel the same way, but for me, it feels like unfinished business as he did not involve me when he decided to terminate their relationship. I have expressed a desire to contact her to explain the abruptness in the cessation of contact, but my husband does not wish me to do so, saying it is over and done and that doing so could lead to more upset and tension between us.
He accepts that had he consulted me before making his approach to her, involving me in their exchanges, and been more restrained in the language used, there was every chance that with time I might eventually have been able to accept this new relationship. As it is, he feels guilty because he didn’t handle the situation well and regrets that he was very unkind to me, explaining that he just did not know how to deal with the problems he had unwittingly caused.
I am saddened at the loss of the easygoing relationship we once enjoyed, as the ongoing effect of this time in our lives is that it is never very far from my thoughts and my dreams. So many conversations, discussions, photographs of my husband’s time spent in Australia, interactions with family and friends, random comments, programmes on tv and radio invoke memories of what happened. Ironically two of our children have made their homes in Australia, and since the revelation visiting them now has taken on a different aspect. We had talked of revisiting my husband’s old haunts, but I would find it difficult not to look for reminders for him of his time spent there and with bio daughter’s mother. I feel a thorn has found its way into my heart and am still waiting for it to be extracted.
I was glad to have found your book but have been saddened by the criticism of those who find difficulty in coming to terms with the new ‘reality’. I was glad to see Brianne Kirkpatrick’s piece on WatershedDNA.com recently on the lack of research into the impact on wives and families of newly discovered bio dads and the lasting emotional turmoil it can cause.
I have listened with interest to the podcasts by women relating their experiences and was relieved to hear them use the words that described my feelings – ‘secrecy’ ‘betrayal’, ‘affair’, ‘another woman had given birth to my husband’s child’, ‘pain’, ‘no shared DNA,’ etc.
Those people who insist that a biological child who is a stranger has a right to have contact with and be part of their bio families have my sympathy, but as a wife and mother on the other side of this dilemma, I truly feel that it is essential that the impact on and the feelings of everyone on both sides of the discovery should be taken into account and treated with equal validity.
The effect on everybody’s mental health, not just that of an NPE, deserves respect.
Yours truly,
Claire