Unless you’ve adopted, there’s no bigger fear for a parent than learning that the child you’ve been raising might not be biologically yours . That’s exactly what happened to one father whose failed paternity test created a rift between himself and his wife.
But the story, which was posted to Reddit by the wife , gets so much stranger and more unexpected.
Though the original post was deleted, it was reuploaded to the BestofRedditorUpdates subreddit.
The post was captioned, “My (29F) husband (31M) got a paternity test on our daughter (5F) and it came back negative, but I never cheated. Now he thinks our relationship is a lie and wants to divorce. What do I do?”
“I don’t know how it happened and I haven’t been able to stop crying all day. I never cheated.”
“There is no other potential father for our daughter… I don’t know why he took that stupid test because I would never, ever cheat, but it came back negative and now he thinks he’s not her dad.”
The user was also convinced that the test was faulty.
She then talks about how her husband has become increasingly suspicious and insecure.
“He accused me this morning, saying he’d done the test after realizing that our daughter’s eyes (brown) wouldn’t naturally come from ours (both blue) and that he wanted me to get out of the house.”
The wife writes that she’s finally able to talk to the husband about different tests she wants to do.
After receiving advice on the original post , the wife decides to test for other things, including Chimerism, which could potentially account for why the daughter has brown eyes despite both parents’ eyes being blue.
But things get even more wild when the wife’s DNA doesn’t match the daughter’s.
In an update, the wife writes, “…some of you guessed it, but my daughter is not biologically mine either.
“I don’t know how this happened, but a police officer came to our house and took our statements, and we’re suing the hospital where I gave birth. I don’t know what happened to my baby, and that is terrifying.”
Understandably, the husband and wife are going through a lot of emotions.
“I’ve been sleeping in my daughter’s room, and I’m so afraid that she’s going to be taken away from me, but at the same time I want to know where my biological daughter is, and if she’s okay. I pray to god she’s okay.”
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The post also includes the husband’s side of the story, which explains his thoughts behind the initial paternity test.
“When Covid happened, I got fat. I got depressed,” the husband wrote. “I stopped feeling like a person. My wife stayed beautiful. She stayed herself. I was sure that she’d made a mistake. That she’d regret being with me.”
He admits that he’d been reading stories online about other men who’d been cheated on.
He posted his fears online, and had commenters tell him he was also being cheated on, which prompted the paternity test.
“I didn’t want to believe it, but yeah, I pulled back,” he continued. “I felt betrayed. I wanted to be a good husband but I couldn’t shake this.”
“My kid is genuinely not biologically mine.”
He then writes, in response to hate he’d received for his reaction at the time, “I didn’t immediately consider that switched at birth was an option. I’ve been through a messed up time, and I don’t think getting angry one time because I thought my wife cheated and was lying about it makes me a monster.”
The story was reposted to different sites.
It’s even made its way to Twitter, where it has tens of thousands of likes and retweets. Considering how rarely they actually happen, I don’t think anyone was expecting this to turn into a switched at birth story.
Many commenters across platforms expressed sympathy for the situation.
You can’t even begin to imagine what this must be like for the wife, husband, their daughter, and the child they’d given birth to, who is now in another household.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments!
