agonyaunt | Two letters about teens and reproductive secrets

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Two letters about teens and reproductive secrets

The first is under a cut because it's awful, the second is under a cut for solidarity.

1. Dear Care and Feeding,

I’m a junior in high school. I’ve been in the high school orchestra since I enrolled, and while I’ve generally enjoyed the activity, I was mostly there for the music, and I hadn’t made any close friends. That changed this year when we had a new kid, “James,” join us. That was awkward. My mother and father don’t have so much a functional marriage as much as they have a wary truce, and James is the product of an affair my dad had a long time ago. I’m not privy to all the details, but my mother often complains about the amount of money that goes off to child support. Dad occasionally visits my half-brother, but I know he isn’t around him much.

I had seen James before he joined the orchestra a few times, enough to recognize him and know he was related, but I had never had a close relationship or really wanted one. But hanging out with him during practice showed me he was cool, and we kind of naturally fell into an older brother-younger brother sort of thing. Plus, he’s good with a viola, and playing together is really quite nice. We started hanging out more, even outside of practice, and it’s generally been great.

However, last week I made the mistake of mentioning who I was hanging out with to my mother. She hit the roof. Told me that being friends with “that little bastard” was taking Dad’s side over hers and sanctioning his cheating. There was a huge fight between them later that night. Things have been icy at home ever since then. I don’t know what to do, or even who to go to for help. I don’t want to give up this friendship. I don’t want to imply I approve of Dad’s affair. I don’t want to play some sort of referee in my parent’s wrangling, and I resent my mother for putting me in this position. But I do understand her feelings, or at least some of them. I just keep looping ‘round and ‘round this mess without coming to any sort of resolution.

— What’s Next?

Dear What’s Next,

This should go without saying, but: You, nor James, did anything wrong. You are brothers, and you deserve to have a relationship with each other if you both so choose. Wanting to spend time with James doesn’t mean you approve of your father’s cheating. It’s unfortunate that your mother is unwilling to see beyond her own feelings of betrayal to recognize that there are two innocent young people being impacted, and that your father hasn’t stepped up to be more of a father to James, or worked to develop a relationship between you.

You can confront your mother and let her know that while you would never want to appear as though you are approving of your father’s past choices, it means a lot to you to have a relationship with your sibling. However, considering what you’ve said thus far, I do not expect her to have a positive reaction or to make peace with your decision. You may be better off continuing to pursue a connection to James, but keeping it to yourself. I know that being dishonest with your parents is less than ideal, but it may be the only way for the two of you to get to know each other while you’re living under your parents’ roof. It’s truly disappointing that your parents cannot get it together to understand why you and James ought to have a connection, but your mother seems to have committed to closing her heart off to this young man. That doesn’t mean that you need to do the same thing. Be as discreet as possible and enjoy getting to know your brother.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/03/puberty-fears-care-and-feeding.html

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2. Q. Not the Mama: This is a weird problem. I have two brothers. One is Zach (38). The other is my younger brother Gil who’s 15 and is convinced that I’m his biological parent and that I was forced to give him up to be raised by our mom and dad as a teenager. He’s believed this since he was 13.

It isn’t true. I was 17 so it was technically possible, but it never happened. The problem is that there is no way that I have found to convince my brother of that. He will let go of it every now and again, but then it will bubble back to the surface. He approached my ex-boyfriend to ask if he was Gil’s “real” father, called our parents “grandmother and grandfather,” and made bitter, inappropriate comments about me “raising my other children” at family events. My children are toddlers and don’t really understand him, but I want this sorted before I have to deal with that too. Zach wants us to do a DNA test to settle this but other proof we’ve offered (photos of me that year not pregnant) just made Gil dig his heels in harder. I believe Gil needs some real psychological help. And anyway, our parents won’t agree. They say we shouldn’t dignify his delusion by addressing it.

That said… his birth was really weird. I was in France for a semester and Zach was at college—neither of us ever saw mom pregnant. The idea that our parents might have adopted a baby is weird (From who? And why, when they’d always expressed relief that she would have an empty nest soon?) but not impossible. It’s a box of worms that I worry about opening when Gil is already in such a weird place. So with that in mind, what seems like the best way to get Gil to stop harassing me about being his mother? I feel mean writing that, and I know he’s always struggled that Zach and I aren’t as close to him as we are with each other, but I also just want him to stop.

A: This is indeed weird. Why don’t you go ahead and do the DNA test just to put it to rest? I agree that a two-year-long obsession with this topic is troubling, but who knows, maybe his instinct that he’s not being told the whole truth is right. Either way, it seems it would be worth it to put his mind at ease (or nudge your parents to tell him the truth about his adoption!) Also, if he won’t accept the evidence or develops another theory about being an outsider in the family or being lied to, that will confirm that there’s an issue with his emotional and mental health that’s bigger than this question. If he goes “Whoops, sorry, I guess my hunch was wrong” and doesn’t lash out, you’re left with a brother who, like you said, would really like to be closer to you. Hopefully, with this issue out of the way, you can make that happen.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/03/secret-mother-brother-dear-prudence-advice.html

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1. Columnist, correctly, told LW that none of this is his fault or his brother's.

However, I wish they'd stated a bit more clearly that LW's mother was wrong and did something wrong. Sometimes people need this spelled out for them, and let's be clear - what she did, what she said? It was wrong. If she can't get her feelings under control enough to keep her behavior in line, then she needs to go to a therapist and not dump that on her son. It's wildly inappropriate for her to act like it's his job to handle her feelings - and honestly, if she did it once, there's every chance that this is something she does frequently.

I know that this is not a usual situation, but if it really was a one-off I feel like she would've apologized. (Not that an apology guarantees that this isn't recurring, but it at least would suggest she's aware that her behavior and her words were wrong.)

2. Truth in advertising, that IS a weird problem! And the parents are making it weirder!

Zach should definitely get that genetic testing. Get everybody tested! And if that doesn't help - or, honestly, even if it does - he should be getting therapy, because wherever this came from, it's been allowed to escalate into a real problem. What sort of parents would rather see their teenage son miserable, and see him making everybody around him miserable, rather than addressing his concerns properly?

I would even advocate going behind the parents back to at least get that testing done, I'm so annoyed at how they're apparently acting. But that's my own feelings talking and I don't know if it's actually good advice to encourage Zach to sneakily get bits of hair or whatever from Mom and Dad.

Spit! All the direct-to-consumer ancestry kits do it with spit (you spit in a tube that has the chip at the bottom of it), so that's hard to do on the sly. You can do paternity/maternity comparison tests with hair if you're careful about what hair you get (you need hair with the root, trimmings from the ends aren't enough) and have samples from both the putative parent and the putative child, but those aren't the same as Ancestry or 23andMe where there's a whole database of people and you can get the whole family tree: it can only say "Mom can/can't be ruled out as the genetic parent of Zach" and not really quantify degree of relationship. (You also need all three samples: father, mother, and putative child -- to be accurate enough: with just two legs of the triangle, you can't actually distinguish parent-child from several other genetic relationships.)

Not that this is relevant to the advice! But yeah, in order to get an accurate genetic relationship, you need to either have all three points of the paternity triangle or have access to a very large database like the one Ancestry and 23andMe have built.

Perhaps, then, I'd advise LW (and older bro if he'll go along with it) to state clearly and firmly that they're cutting off contact with Mom and Dad if they don't spit in a cup. Yes, both of them. Yes, in front of Zach, and then everything is sealed and he can walk to the mailbox to mail it. Yes, right now.

Gil. :) Zach's the older brother; Gil is the one convinced his sister is his mom.

lol I came in to the comments because I wasn't sure if OTC DNA tests would be able to distinguish between sibling and parent but then I saw this comment and you would know. (I mean, at least, S would, and therefore you would.)

Parent-child looks quite different from sibling. Siblings share on average 50% of DNA, but the exact percentage can vary a surprising amount. Parent/child is 50% almost exactly and is clearly one entire half of each chromosome, not dotted around.

I mean, I say that because we've done the actual statistical calculations and by FBI standards, my sister and I in isolation (with neither of our parents in the calculations) meet the threshold that one of us could be the other's parent, and my wife and her sister have similar enough profiles that my wife can't be ruled out as the parent of our eldest niece.

But if you look at the number of DNA segments, they will be quite different between parent/child and sibling. I share 23 segments with my son, spanning the entire chromosomes, and with my brothers I share 42 and 49 segments, broken up across the chromosomes. One brother is ~53% and one ~44%.

Furthermore, with my son all of the segments are half-identical, whereas with my brothers the half-identical segments have sections that are completely identical (meaning that in that area we got the same bit from Dad and the same bit from Mom, rather than one or the other). With one brother I have 42 segments (3014 centimorgans) that within them contain 43 completely identical segments (total 931 cM out of the 3014). With the other I have 49 segments (2534 cM) that within them contain 26 completely identical segments (708 cM). With my son, a much simpler result: 23 segments, 3719 cM, no completely identical segments. My brothers share with each other 43 segments, 3027 cM, within those 39 segments completely identical, 1062 cM.

(Note: It's not impossible for parent and child to have stretches of completely identical DNA, but it would imply that the tested parent was genetically related to the child's other parent.)

Edited 2023-03-25 19:13 (UTC)

Yeah, you're talking about something completely different than I am. Forensic paternity tests use the CODIS alleles, which count short tandem repeats (STRs) at 20 very specific non-coding loci, not across the whole genome. The whole-genome segment method of calculating genetic linkage is not statistically robust enough for forensic purposes yet (and probably won't be for a significantly long time, given how many states have passed laws against forensic genetic geneology investigations, which is preventing robust scientific validation of the methods -- there are a few manufacturers working on validating kinship analysis methods using other-than-CODIS STR loci, but it's going to take a long time to establish robust enough statistical methods).

My wife is a forensic DNA analyst. Many, many forensic DNA analysts have collected samples from multiple kinship groups they know (including their own: she's gotten profiles from her family out to second cousins) for validation studies when they're validating a new process or reagent kit! This is how I know that if you look at our forensic DNA profiles as a single comparator, the population statistics say that my sister and I are absolutely related, we are more likely to be siblings than any other relationship, but if you look at the actual profile, we could also be parent/child in either direction, and this is how I know that if you look at my wife and her niece's forensic DNA profiles as a single comparator, my wife could be my niece's parent (because she and her sister have one of the highest sibling index factors she's ever seen in her career).

Well, that's not an OTC test, is it? I'm describing what you'd see from a service like 23andme. And the difference is very clear there. I am surprised that's not something that you can see easily on forensic DNA analysis, but I did not pretend to know anything about that. (https://www.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/ask378 appears to be the sort of test you're talking about, while https://www.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/ask284 under "Some More Genealogical Fun" illustrates the sort of thing I was talking about.)

It is absolutely the test that is run if you have a private (what you're calling "OTC") paternity test done, because again, the statistics are established to a degree that they are legally and scientifically valid and the sort of thing you're talking about has never been statistically validated to a degree it can be used in the legal system (and, barring scenarios like this letter where it would be done for familial peace of mind, 80% of kinship testing is to establish kinship for legal purposes).

The sort of kinship mapping you see from 23andMe or Ancestry is probably, eventually going to be statistically and scientifically valid enough that it will wind up passing the legal standard of admissibility at some point, but it isn't yet, and it's not going to be anytime soon until and unless they publicize their algorithms and they're reproducible and validatable, which they aren't right now. (And the other reason forensic genetic geneology has never progressed beyond a few high-profile headline-grabbing cases, aside from states having passed kneejerk laws to prohibit labs from using it, is because the vast majority of labs that tried it realized that it didn't do a damn thing to actually advance the investigation because genetic kinship and familial structure are two entirely separate concepts, but that's a whole 'nother digression.)

By over-the-counter I meant tests like 23andme or Ancestry. I thought that was what you meant in your first comment above when you talked about spitting in a tube for direct-to-consumer ancestry tests. I think these days that's what would spring to mind first for most people. I could of course be wrong about that.

LW2 better be prepared for some unwelcome results if they do go the Ancestry/23andMe route. One of my cousins did one of those and found out she had a previously unknown older half-sister that way -- talk about awkward. If Gil's suspicions that he is not the biological son of his parents (son of an affair, son of the older brother for some reason, straight-out adopted) are true, you'd need to be ready to deal with that.

I think you mean Gil, not Zach? [EDIT: oh, wait, I see now it was Zach pushing for the test, that's what you meant.] Also, if Gil and Zach have the same father, they'd share a Y chromosome and hence a paternal haplogroup, whereas if Gil were the child of LW and some boyfriend, it would be way less likely (though not impossible) that he would have the same paternal haplogroup as Zach. Assuming Zach and LW are indeed full siblings, they would have their mother's maternal haplogroup, so that wouldn't be a point of distinction between LW's mom and LW as mothers. But if Zach was Gil's father and the mother was his girlfriend, again it would be unlikely for LW's maternal haplogroup to match the girlfriend's.

Edited 2023-03-26 00:08 (UTC)

Wha....................

I wish C&F had come down harder on "it is never okay to punish a child for the sins of their parent." I sense that LW mostly gets that, but I think it needed stating more firmly for the inevitable moment when Mom learns LW is still friends with James. LW needs to be prepared to firmly state, "Mom, what Dad did is not James's fault, and it's not okay for you to call him names."

LW2...yeah, I agree about the DNA test, because this needs to be nipped in the bud well before LW's kids are old enough to understand.

It's about two years too late to be nipped in the bud, but it still needs nipping.

I'm not convinced Gil's perceptions are nippable at this point. Honestly I feel like it probably didn't come out of nowhere, but at some point at that age it became just part of the way his world works, and his friends probably believe it as well and feedback loops et al are happening.)

There are a lot of reasons I try not to use the word "bastard" at all any longer.

The parents' strange lack of concern in the second letter does make me wonder if the DNA test will show something it shouldn't, that's unrelated to the kid's belief that the LW is his mother.

That was my thought, too.

I would make a (small) bet on older brother Zach being the kid's father, with the mother a college girlfriend who wasn't ready to raise a child.

I would say there's reasonable odds it's either that, or he's the father's affair partner's kid. (I would also lay reasonable odds that regardless of the biological parentage, at least one of the parents is resenting Gil's existence and he's picked up on that. It sounds like LW has not spent enough time in the household since Gil's birth to have picked up on whatever it is but I bet it's there.

I would also lay reasonable odds that regardless of the biological parentage, at least one of the parents is resenting Gil's existence and he's picked up on that

It could also be that Gil has biofather and biomother that his parents are saying that he has,

but that he was a !whoops! pregnancy and one of the parents wanted an abortion...

Yeah, "they’d always expressed relief that she would have an empty nest soon" is certainly interesting pronoun use.

My guess is the father's affair partner's kid? If Zach's kid, it would be odd that he's the one pushing for the test. Absolutely agree that there's something in the household that Gil is picking up on.

Good point. Also, there was something about photographs of LW not pregnant, but are there no photographs of LW's mom pregnant with Gil? or holding him in the hospital with wristbands or anything?

I feel so bad for these kids having to be the adults because their parents refuse to be.

that said I'm saving both letters in my plotbunny hutch.

Tagging this was an adventure.

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Two letters about teens and reproductive secrets

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