(no subject)

[conuly]

Dear Therapist,

When I married my husband, he had two adult children, and I had none. We both wanted to have a child together, but my husband had a vasectomy after his second child was born—too long ago to get the procedure reversed.

We didn’t want to use a sperm bank, so we asked my husband’s son to be the donor. We felt that was the best decision: Our child would have my husband’s genes, and we knew my stepson’s health, personality, and intelligence. He agreed to help.

Our daughter is 30 now. How do we tell her that her “father” is her grandfather, her “brother” is her father, her “sister” is her aunt, and her “nephew” is her half-brother?

My husband and I are anxious, confused, and worried about telling her. This is also hard on my husband, because he wants our daughter to know that he will always and forever be her father.

Thank you for any advice you have to offer.

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

I’m glad that you and your husband have decided to tell your daughter the truth. As you think about how to have an honest conversation, keep in mind that there are two truths your daughter will be absorbing simultaneously: First, the person she calls her brother is her biological father, and second, the people she calls her parents have deceived her for 30 years.

I point out the latter not to place blame but to prepare you for how your daughter might feel, even if you believe you had good reasons to hide the truth. In fact, I’m certain that you and your husband kept your daughter’s paternity a secret because you felt this would protect her—from confusion, shame, or societal judgment. It’s also possible that you were (consciously or subconsciously) trying to protect your husband, too, from a fear voiced in your letter—that if your daughter knew the truth, she might not think of your husband as her father in quite the same way as she does now.

I have deep compassion for the position you’re both in. At the time your daughter was conceived, 30 years ago, many parents who used a sperm donor were strongly advised by physicians not to share this information with the child, based on the belief that secrecy was better for everyone involved. However, in the years since, many children conceived in this way have said that instead of protecting them, secrecy left them feeling unmoored, angry, and betrayed.

Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison,” and in fact, secrets can literally make us sick. This applies to everyone in the family—you and your husband, who have held the secret inside; your stepson, who likely has feelings about his biological daughter being treated as his sister, and who might be perpetuating the lie with his own partner and child; your stepdaughter, who either feels the burden of carrying this secret or was also kept in the dark; and, of course, your daughter, who might sense, somewhere deep inside, that something she can’t name has always felt off.

Family secrets have a way of being felt even if they’re unspoken: Many people who grew up in a home with family secrets say that they always had a sense that something was not as it seemed, and that this resulted in chronic unease. What people don’t realize is that in trying to protect a child from whatever danger they believe the truth would pose, they’re likely making that child feel less safe than they would if they knew the truth.

You don’t say why you’ve decided that now is the time to be honest—maybe you realized that your daughter might someday take a DNA test “for fun” and you’d prefer that she find out from you instead of a lab report; maybe you feel she should have access to an accurate medical history; maybe you’ve simply come to see how important it is for her to know the truth about who she is, and for the entire family to live authentically at last. Whatever the reason, and however challenging this revelation might be, know that you’re doing the right thing.

With this context in mind, how do you tell your daughter? First, state the facts as simply and clearly as possible: We have something important to tell you, and we wish we had told you sooner. When we wanted to have a child together, we discovered that wouldn’t be possible. We considered our options and decided to ask your brother to be our donor, because we felt it would be safer and more desirable to choose someone we knew who shared your father’s DNA.

Then apologize and take full responsibility for not telling her the truth from the beginning. Don’t make excuses or ask for her understanding; tell her you can imagine how shocking this must be, and that you feel terrible for denying her the right to know where she comes from and who she is. If she asks why you kept this a secret, tell her what you were afraid of without in any way defending or justifying your decision. Reiterate that if you could do this again, you would be honest from the start. Tell your daughter who else knows, so there are no secrets remaining in the family. Make sure to communicate that you’re aware that you betrayed her trust, and that it might take some time to rebuild. Tell her that this should never have been a secret, and that, because this is her story, you encourage her to share it with whomever she wants.

The key is to talk as little as possible and not make this about your feelings. Instead, check in with her about how she’s feeling, and ask what you can do to support her. She might feel anger, grief, betrayal, relief, or a combination of these—so it will take her some time to process the news. This is simply the first step in what will be an ongoing conversation, so be sure to let her know you’re happy to talk more anytime. If she doesn’t bring it up again, you can gently check in with her every once in a while. And if you or your husband are uncomfortable discussing it once the secret is out, seek counseling on your own so that your discomfort doesn’t make your daughter hesitant to talk openly and honestly with you both.

You should also tell your stepson and any other family members who know the truth that you’re sharing it with your daughter, and that they should be respectful of how she wants to handle her story. Ask your daughter if she wants your support in talking with the person she knows as her brother, or if she would like to seek individual or family therapy (in any combination) to help integrate this new information into her sense of self and navigate the complicated family dynamics. Meanwhile, show interest in and compassion for the feelings your stepson might not have felt free to express when his true relationship with his “sister” was shrouded in secrecy. Remember that even though he was an adult when you asked him to be your donor, he still may not have fully appreciated the implications of being the biological father of someone he would call his sister—someone he’d be forced to lie to.

As you free your family from its long-held secret, you might feel less anxious approaching your daughter if you remember that there will be many conversations to follow, so no single conversation has to go perfectly—and that the truth, no matter how messy, is what makes people feel safe and connected. You clearly love your daughter, and we owe honesty to the people we love.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/02/how-to-tell-child-sperm-donor/673194/

Comments

[conuly]

1. I am astonished that LW never, at any point, brings up Stepson's feelings or any ethical consideration around what disclosure at this point means for him.

2. The moral of this story, as always, is never lie to your kids. Waiting until your daughter was 30 to tell her... that's about 30 years too late, except that the scale is weird and every additional year after 5-ish counts more than you'd expect.

[cereta]

I get that this is complex issue, but can we maybe lose the scare quotes around "brother" and "sister"? These are the roles they've occupied for thirty years. DNA doesn't change that.

[minoanmiss]

Word

[tielan]

As a society, we are exceedingly attached to familial relationship terms in a very rigid, biological way.

[shirou]

I am shocked that a full three people—LW, her husband, and her stepson—concluded that the stepson was a reasonable choice as donor. Am I alone in finding that choice bizarre and problematic?

[conuly]

Oh, yeah, no, I am very much with you. I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to call it problematic if he was an adult who lived independently at that time, but it's definitely a weird choice all around.

[ethelmay]

I wonder what the son's wife (I am assuming from the existence of a half-brother) thinks? Does she know about this? Seems like a very weird thing to find out suddenly about one's spouse.

The other thing I wonder (because heck, this is a soap-opera scenario already) is whether the sperm donor business is in fact a story covering up an actual sexual encounter. It seems to me that a responsible fertility clinic wouldn't do this kind of thing. That said, fertility clinic people have done weirder stuff over the years.

[hashiveinu]

They could have just used a turkey baster and not a fertility clinic - it's a lot cheaper.

[ethelmay]

I suppose so. Still seems like an oogy thing to do. If I had semen I wouldn't want my stepmother to have ever seen it (even though I am sure it all looks the same).

[minoanmiss]

I would like to think that a person in stepson’s position could be okay with it but I honestly can’t imagine how

[cimorene]

Yeah, it makes it much more like both a soap opera and a murder mystery, so I think it's safe to say it was a very strange and bad idea.

[ashbet]

I honestly can't nail down WHY I find this quite so disturbing -- there's nothing actually incestuous, but it's a form of "psychic incest" to ask the stepson to keep a secret of this magnitude.

I don't think it was an appropriate ask for his father and stepmother to make of him.

With all that said, I think the answer kind of frames this unnecessarily dramatically -- this doesn't have to be portrayed as a dark and twisted family secret.

Fairly matter-of-factly, they could say something like:

"We want to let you know something that affects you: at the time you were conceived, the prevailing wisdom was that sperm donation shouldn't be mentioned to children, but things have changed in the intervening years. We used a family member as a donor, so that your Dad would still have a biological relationship with you. We love you very much, and I hope you'll understand that we're telling you now to avoid keeping information from you -- we felt a lot of fear about your view of us changing, or your relationship with your Dad changing. If you need some time to think about it, that's fine -- let us know if you want to know more."

They should be forthcoming if she has questions, but this gives her a chance to CONSENT TO HEARING THE DETAILS -- she won't be able to unhear/unknow the information about her brother, so she should be given a choice.

[tielan]

Oh, this seems like a good mode of directing the conversation. And, yes, it gives the daughter control of what information she wants and when she wants it.

[lethe1]

Oh yes, this is good!

[adrian_turtle]

This is a great frame!

[topaz_eyes]

It's not entirely bizarre for LW and husband to want a child biologically related to both of them. But testicular sperm retrieval was not developed until 1997 (4 years after daughter's birth), which would have allowed them to obtain husband's sperm directly. The available biological donor options at the time were either the stepson, or a paternal uncle if one was around.

It is definitely problematic for the stepson though, because he has a lot at stake with his own family. Is stepson's wife in the picture? Does she know about LW's daughter's paternity, or is it a secret to her too? Imho the stepson really should be allowed a say in this disclosure, or at least a heads-up.

[castiron]

I can see them making that choice if they wanted the donor to be a close biological relative of the husband and the stepson was the only candidate. It's a little squicky, but it's not like LW slept with her stepson to get pregnant (I hope!).

That said, I'm used to the idea of large age-gap siblings that are actually biological parent/child. And *that* said, the ones I'm familiar with involve a daughter who had a unplanned child that her parents adopted, not a planned gamete donation by a stepchild.

[lethe1]

No, when I read that, my first reaction was "ick!"

[laurajv]

I feel like this question was also asked in another column? Maybe Slate?

[conuly]

I'll take a look there. If I find it, or if somebody else does, I'll either edit this post to include that link or, if it's been long enough, make a new one and link back here.

[liv]

I'm generally in favour of always telling the children the truth about their parentage, but in this case, at this late stage, it just seems like telling the whole story is doing more harm than good. It's going to be awful for the stepson and his family, it's just dredging up old history in a way that doesn't matter. I like the idea of apologizing to the daughter for years of lying to her, but I think it would be better to say that she was conceived with donor sperm from a near paternal relative without spelling it all out. Thing is, there just isn't much in the way of health or identity implication here, unless there's some massive genetic timebomb in the step-brother / sperm donor's maternal line I guess. With father and son I doubt a DNA test would even clearly show non-paternity. If it had been an anon sperm donor the emotional implications would be less but the genetic and health implications would be much greater, so on balance it would definitely be good to disclose. In this actual case, I'm honestly not sure.

[ethelmay]

The difference between grandfather and father would actually be very clear on a DNA test. If she and her biological grandfather were tested, she would expect a match of almost exactly 50%, in long neat lines down each chromosome, and instead she'd get 25%, in various blobs.

[topaz_eyes]

This reads like soap opera, but first-degree gamete donors are not unknown in assisted reproduction and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine has suggested guidelines (https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282%2804%2900889-1/fulltext). The main ethical concern with son-to-father (or daughter-to-mother) gamete donation like this is whether the gamete donor was coerced into donating.

The daughter deserves to know, yes absolutely. But we don't know the conditions under which LW's stepson made the donation, i.e. whether he was aware that his role could be disclosed at some point. If he agreed because he was promised his role would never be revealed, LW and her husband are reneging on that promise. Telling the daughter may very well cost their relationship with the stepson and they do need to be aware of that going forward.

The worst reason I can think of

[azurelunatic]

I hope this has not come up because this woman has met someone from the family of the ex-wife of her purported father.

Re: The worst reason I can think of

[ethelmay]

I wouldn't think she'd get involved with a half-sibling - she would know that their mother was her half-brother's mother, and that would be awkward even if she thought there was no biological relationship. So that leaves the possibility of ex-wife's nephews, who would be first cousins of half-brother/biodad, which makes them daughter's first cousins once removed, or grand-nephews, who would be her second cousins. Those would both be quite reasonably far removed genetically, and even first cousins aren't much of a problem if you don't have repeated cousin marriages down the generations (and assuming they aren't double cousins or the offspring of identical twins). (Half siblings share about the same amount of genetic material as first cousins do, due to sharing one set of grandparents in both cases, but there's less shuffling and a higher likelihood of deleterious genes getting doubled. I think. Anyhow half sibling marriage isn't legal and first cousin marriage often is.)

That said, if you think you are marrying someone who isn't at all closely related to you, it can be a shock to find out that they are.