Ask Amy: in which both partners should run t. f. away

[lemonsharks]

Ask Amy: I wouldn’t have gotten involved if I knew the child was his

Dear Amy: I have been with my live-in boyfriend for over three years. He has two children, and I have three.

The issue I’m wrestling with is that he recently found out that he has a third child, a 5-year-old.

When we met, he told me he had already established that the child wasn’t his, via his mom taking a DNA test, which showed that this baby had no DNA connection to his family.

Well, surprise … the child is his.

Now I feel betrayed and duped. I wouldn’t have been with him had I known about this third child.

I am in love with him, and the best way I can describe my current emotion is to say that, to me, it’s the equivalent to being cheated on.

He doesn’t understand why I have such strong feelings about this situation. He said I am supposed to support him.

I’m not sure how I can do that when I feel second-rate to three women who have his children, and yet I don’t have a child with him. He has told me he has no desire for marriage.

So I am supposed to be his girlfriend for the rest of my life, while these women have a solidified place in his life and a bigger connection to him than I am going to have?

I don’t want to end things with him, but how can I help these feelings I have and find a way to accept this and move on?

So Many Feelings



Dear So Many Feelings: I urge you to re-examine your choices — and for now to only do so from the vantage point of what would benefit you and your children.

In the short term, your reaction to this situation is to want what these other women have: a baby with this man.

From my perspective, if you did have a baby with him, you’d be joining a fairly crowded club.

I hope you double up on birth control, because this man is extremely fertile and also someone who has to be dragged into fatherhood.

He either outright lied to you when you first met or is too dim to understand that DNA does not lie.

Furthermore, he responds to your shock about this third child by insisting that your role is to support him.

Well, his role is to support you, too (and, by the way, all of his children).

People are somewhat predictable. Your boyfriend has established a pattern of overall selfishness.

Well-matched partners grasp hands and ride life’s roller-coaster together. If you don’t feel that you two are able to do that, then you should carefully reconsider staying with him, long term.

You say you want to stay with him. If you do stay, you should accept that you might be riding this roller-coaster alone.

Comments

[lemonsharks]

I think I've seen this episode of the Maury Povich show.

[azurelunatic]

oh no

run

[castiron]

She feels betrayed and duped because he lied to her about being the father of this third child. Okay, that part's reasonable.

But then, she's not angry because he had a child and wasn't willing to acknowledge and care for it. She's angry because he had this child before they even met, and now she feels cheated on. Because of this child, not because of the other two children by two other women.

And now she wants to have a baby with a man who's already shown three times that he doesn't consider that a lifetime commitment.

I hope to $DEITY that these two turn out to be one of those couples who are infertile with each other, because their theoretical kids doesn't deserve to beo born into this.

(Also, LW, you have three kids already. Do you think you have a stronger connection to their father(s) than you do to your current boyfriend?)

[ethelmay]

Yeah, it's weird that she thinks he has such a big connection to the mothers of his kids when she apparently doesn't have any worth mentioning to the father(s) of hers. And no one says, hey, maybe six kids among you is enough? How do they each treat the kids who are already there? Can all these people afford the kids they have (in time and attention as well as money)? Do they like them as people? Are the kids thriving?

[ashbet]

All of this.

I think she’s displacing her understandable anger/distress at him having LIED TO HER FACE as “jealousy/feeling cheated-on,” because that’s easier than confronting that what he did should be a relationship-ender.

She doesn’t want to break up (and be a single mother with 3 kids again), so she’s contemplating bringing a child into the world to try to create a permanent bond with him… but that obviously didn’t work with the mothers of his three OTHER children.

They absolutely should not have kids together, and I agree that the priority should be the welfare of their existing children.

No child should be born for reasons other than a genuine desire and intent to love and provide for them.

[raine]

She's definitely on the "if I have a baby with him, then he'll stay!" train. I just want to point out to her, using vehement language and actions, that clearly the evidence shows that man is not ever going to fall for that trap.

[cereta]

I think maybe she had never really reconciled herself to him having other children (whether because he's a crap father, because she's a ginormous hypocrite, or because she's one of those people who think men - and only men - should walk away from children when the relationship with the mother ends) as well as she thought she had. She's likely loading all of her anxieties about the lifetime connection he (technically) has to his exes onto this one situation, especially when it's compounded by either him lying about it or the possibility that there may be more children out there. It's not rational, but clearly, neither is she.

[minoanmiss]

*reads*
*reads again*
*arranges for benevolent fairy godparents for the extant children because someone needs to be on their side*

(don't I wish I could)

[melannen]

This.

Forget LW and her bf, somebody please help the kids.

[sathari]

This... is missing so much information.

Why is the third kid more of a problem for LW than the other two? Why is LW attaching significance to reproducing together when neither she nor BF are partnered with the other co-parents of their various children? (At first I came away with the impression that the 5yo was one of the older kids in the extended/blended/exteblended family, but now I'm rethinking that it's a houseful of teenagers and maybe LW didn't sign on to another dozen years of parenting and/or BF's relationship with other-parent-of-5yo was recent enough in his dating history when she got together with BF that she feels particularly threatened by this connection? I.e. she was previously okay with the babymommas who are far enough in BF's rearview as her babydaddy/ies are for her but this more recent relationship and more recent kid have her feeling more threatened?)

And, relatedly, did BF lie to her, did BF's mom lie to him about the DNA test, or is there some other thing going on there?

(I smell something weird going on with the relationship among the babymomma of the 5yo and BF and his family and possibly also LW and this particular babymomma, but I could be way off base here because the information given is... insufficient data to proceed?) (Another possibility is that LW was in what she thought was a permanent monogamous relationship with the babydaddy of her previous children and he left her for a newer model with whom he had a child younger than the ones she had with him and this is bringing all of that back up again.) (But seriously, LW knew the man had two children by two different women so IMO the simplest explanation is that LW is displacing a bunch of insecurities around BF and/or BF's mom not being honest with her onto the idea of having a child with him as being a reliable connection when obviously it is not for this dude. Again, possibly with a side order of there being something about the particular relationship among LW, babymomma-of-5yo, and BF/his family that's causing A Thing that somehow BF's other two children by two other women is not? Insufficient data to proceed.)

[shanaqui]

I think LW needs some therapy for her obsession with kids being what creates a bond between people. That isn't really what's going on for them; the child existed before this relationship, and maybe (just maybe) there's some innocent misunderstanding going on re: the DNA test.

(DNA tests can be wrong, sorry Amy. Cross-contamination, labelling mistakes, insufficient DNA, DNA too degraded for whatever reason by the time the test is actually done... and someone lying/providing the wrong DNA sample deliberately/etc.)

The guy may have lied, but the LW doesn't actually say so. She doesn't explain the situation there at all.

So we could also have a situation where a mistake was made or the liar was not LW's boyfriend, and she just refuses to forgive him for having a child with someone else before meeting her. What?!

[castiron]

I'd also like to know more about the DNA test; I'm assuming it's an Ancestry/23&Me/FTDNA/MyHeritage test given that it's the potential grandmother and not the potential father who tested.

It's possible that there could've been a testing error, particularly with trying to get a good sample from a small kid. But if grandmother has other matches who fit with known relatives, and kid has matches who fit known relatives (presumably kid's mom would've tested?), then that indicates the individal tests are valid.

And that said, the range for grandparent/grandchild match also covers auncle/nibling matches, so just because boyfriend's mother and the kid have a match in the right range doesn't necessarily mean boyfriend is the father. Maybe boyfriend has a brother; maybe his mother has a much younger brother who's the father of this kid; maybe the kid's mother is an unknown close relative of the boyfriend's mother -- a lot depends on whether this is a relatively small endogamous community or a community with lots of in- and out-migration.

(None of which takes away from the main point that LW should not be having a child with this man.)

[ethelmay]

But I thought the point was that the grandmother didn't have a match with LW's boyfriend's child? (Which could mean LW's boyfriend isn't her biological son!) Or the whole story of the DNA non-match could be bogus, and either they actually show a match or neither was tested at all. LW never says how she knows the kid is the boyfriend's.

[castiron]

This is an excellent point. Who really tested and who shows up in each other's matches?

If they all tested at the same service, and boyfriend matches his mother and his kid but the mother and kid don't show up in each other's matches, then there are a bunch of genetic genealogists who would love to talk to these folks and examine their test results.

And yet again, in any case, and to reiterate LW should not scramble her DNA with this guy, at least not unless she wants to be a single mother of *four* kids.

[lemonsharks]

If the mother and kid don't match each other as parent/child, and mother used her own egg to grow the kid, then the mother is a chimera whose reproductive DNA is actually that of a fraternal XX sibling. And she should get that on record to avoid any custody nastiness that may arise.

[ethelmay]

The potential non-biomom situation I saw was the boyfriend and the boyfriend's mom. Boyfriend is surely far too old to be in his mother's custody. We don't have any data on whether the five-year-old's mom was tested.

[lemonsharks]

This is why English should never have dropped properly declining its nouns