He just created me, but you’re my dad.” Made me cry in the restaurant. It runs in my family, and she was saying, “Oh, I have a good complexion.” And I said, “Oh, you probably got it from your dad.” And she goes, “Dad, you can say biological father. We were talking about I got diagnosed with rosacea. She still comes over with my biological son. She has zero interest in meeting her biological father. I’ll always be your father.” I just consider her my daughter, and I love her just the same-the love hasn’t changed at all. She goes, “Dad, I’m worried you’re going to reject me.” I said, “I’ll never reject you.
She was worried … this is a conversation we had. Zhang: Being a parent-it’s like this is incredibly upsetting for you, but you also have to be a parent and protect your child and think about her feelings.Ĭhris: Yes, you do. Sometimes it’s hard, ’cause she reminds me of what my ex did. I even tease her a little bit, saying, “Oh, you got this trait from me,” which she chuckled at. Don’t blame her.” So I consider her my daughter. Zhang: Did finding out change your relationship with your daughter, even if just at first?Ĭhris: On the day that I found out, I was like, I wanted to reject her, because I said my boundary was I will not raise another man’s child from an affair. They consider her my daughter, their granddaughter, their niece. But my family treats her just like she’s a biological child. She’s an innocent person in this.” That NPE stuff ripples throughout families.
I said, “No, I don’t want to ever hear that.
You’re the reason Dad’s divorcing my mom.” I put a stop to that. It changed the dynamic for a long time between my son and her.Ĭhris: My son said, “You’re the reason why our family is breaking up. The worst was to see the reaction of my daughter. When I bought the test, my daughter went and told her mom, and then an hour and a half, two hours later, in the middle of the night, my ex gets up and she says, “I need to talk to you ’cause I had an affair. Zhang: So you had already suspected something.Ĭhris: I knew my ex-wife was having affairs back then, and I couldn’t catch her. My ex said, “No, you already know who you are because everybody’s tested.” I knew she was lying, so I said, “Okay, I’ll buy you a test.” They had a Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale back last year, and my daughter was curious about her ethnicity and so she asked us for a test. I’m into genealogy, and so myself, my ex-wife, and the grandparents are all taking the DNA tests. Zhang: How did you find out? Was it your daughter who took an AncestryDNA test?Ĭhris: Yes. The transcript below has been edited and condensed for clarity. We spoke about how revelation has changed his family, what it’s like to parent a teen going through this, and the particular difficulties of talking about this as a man. Two and a half weeks after the discovery, he filed for divorce. (They also have a 13-year-old son, who is his biological child.) Earlier this year, after buying his now-15-year-old daughter an AncestryDNA test, Christopher found out that he is not her biological father. One such father is Christopher, whose real name we are withholding at his request. The creator of DNA NPE Friends, Catherine St Clair, recently created a group for the fathers. Many of them belonged to a private Facebook support group called DNA NPE Friends-where NPE stands for “not parent expected”-that sprang up to connect the thousands of people who’ve had their identities altered by a DNA test. They have also, in some cases, uncovered difficult family secrets.Įarlier this year, I heard from dozens of people who took a DNA test only to discover their fathers were not their biological fathers. The tests have reunited long-lost cousins and helped adoptees find their birth parents, donor-conceived kids their sperm donors.
As DNA-testing companies sell millions of kits, they’ve started to rearrange families.
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