I WOULD LIKE to share my experience on finding out I was not the father of a child I supported and loved as my own flesh and blood for 26 years. I was moved to do this after reading recently in this paper about a man who discovered through a DNA test that he was not the father of the child he supported for 14 years.
What hurt that man was the harassment and embarrassment the child’s mother put him through. And for him the system adds insult to the injurious deception he was put through because there is no provision for the court to deal with women who lie like this. Instead he has to get a lawyer and sue her for all the money he would have paid her.
That is shameful. How can it be right for a woman to get child support by just naming a man who had sex with her as the father without going through any scientific tests to prove her statement? I would think if tests were done from the beginning then a lot of men would not be treated unfairly.
Given that we have the facilities here to do DNA tests, it is the right thing to do now to be fair to each person involved – the mother, supposed father, and the child. I sure hope we wouldn’t have to wait until some man kills a woman in revenge for saddling him with a responsibility that isn’t his for such changes to be brought in.
I am telling my story because I think it would help men who go through this deception to realize that though they may hate the woman, it is the child that really matters in the end. So if the child is attached to them and they have strong feelings for the child, they should continue to assist and blank the mother, if possible.
My case was much different from the other deceived men I have heard about – different in that most of these men were spreading their seed around and got caught. In my case I loved the woman and wanted her in my life. We had unprotected sex, so when she told me she was pregnant I naturally assumed that I was the father.
Facial characteristics
If I had any doubts, and I had none, when the baby was born and as she grew up, she had the facial characteristics of me and my family. People used to say she looked like my mother when my mum was young. So there was no doubt about her not being a member of my family at all.
Eventually, the child’s mother and I got married and have two other children, but my favourite is my first daughter. She was always special to me and continues to be. I think our closeness today is due in part to having had more time to spend with her than the other two, as I was younger and didn’t have as many commitments.
Anyway, it was by accident that I found out she was not mine. My daughter needed to get blood donated because she decided to have surgery to deal with her fibroids. It was a drastic step, but she was determined to have the opportunity to have a child early and, if need be, remove her uterus by the time she hit 30.
So I went and gave blood for her. Out of curiosity I asked the technician what my blood type was as I never knew. When he told me, it was different from my daughter’s. I was troubled as I thought our blood types had to be the same as I was her father. So I asked my wife how could that be.
After much hesitation and a few tears, she told me about something that happened to her all those years ago.
She reminded me that she started coming to my house with her brother who was friends with my older brother (my senior by 20 months). She had a crush on him, but in the course of time found me more interesting and started to talk with me instead.
She went by the house one evening and I was out playing basketball. My brother was there and they got to talking. Then, as no one else was at home, he forced himself on her and took her virginity.
She went home after that and never told anyone.
By the time we had sex for the first time about six weeks later, she had already missed her period.
Hate her for lying She explained that she did not have the heart to tell me as she loved me and she was scared I would think that she was worthless and a liar. So she never said anything to me at all because she did not want to lose me.
I was angry and a part of me hated her for lying to me. I hated my brother too for what he did. Then I began to think about her hostility to my brother.
She never had anything good to say about him through the years and always avoided being in the same room with him.
I remember how she always said that he didn’t respect me as I only saw or heard him when he needed financial help. A flood of memories from what she told me about him came rushing back, all showing her dislike for him. Now I knew the real reason.
It took some time for me to gather my thoughts on this matter, but eventually I realized that though she lied about who impregnated her, she truly loved me and that incident was not her fault but my brother’s.
That is now our secret, which we will take to our graves. My daughter will never know that I am really her uncle, and her uncle is actually her father. I love that girl so much, and having been with her from her mother’s womb till now, I consider her my daughter; she is my and pride and joy.
EDITOR’S NOTE: A child doesn’t necessarily have his/her father’s blood type.
This is how it goes: every person has two alleles out of three possible. Alleles are one of two or more forms of the DNA sequence of a particular gene. Each gene can have different alleles. We’ll call them types O, A and B.
If you have O and O, you have O phenotype. That is, your blood type is O. If you have O and A or A and A, you have A phenotype. If you have A and B, you have AB phenotype.
If your father has O and A, which means he has an A blood type, and the mother has O and B, which means she has B blood type, you get one allele of each parent. That means you can have either OO, OA, OB, or AB. Your blood type can be anything! O, A, B, AB – you name it!
You can clearly see, then, that you can have a different kind of blood type from your father.
