16 October 2023 , 16:50
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It’s vitally important that a couple should know the important things about each other before marrying. Everything from whether you both want kids, to political views and values and how your individual beliefs align ideally need to be considered if you are to have a happy and long union. But sometimes, when you think you know all there is about a person, you can still find out something shocking.
Such was the case for one woman who had been with her husband Eric since they were childhood sweethearts. They grew up together in a small, predominately white town and married after she left school. He was two years older than her and when she was 26, she fell pregnant with fraternal twins, a boy called EJ and a girl named Natalie. She took to Reddit to share her story where she revealed the twins looked very different.
"As the twins got older, EJ started to look like Eric (blonde hair albeit curly and fair skin), and Natalie started to look like me (dark wavy hair),” she wrote. “But her skin would get darker like she had a permanent tan. Eric and I were confused by this because no one in our families had a skin complexion like this."
She also revealed that both she and Eric were white in appearance, although she was “not typical”. When the twins were seven-years-old, Eric got a job as a policeman and they moved to the city and it was then that she noticed his views on race. She said: "I started to notice that Eric would make prejudicial comments against certain communities of people that I would shrug off because they were not overtly offensive."
However his opinions raised their ugly head when one of Eric’s colleagues noticed how different the children were in appearance and made a shocking remark: "One of Eric’s co-workers noticed a picture of EJ and Natalie and asked if Natalie was adopted as she had African-American features and suggested that I might have had an affair after conceiving with Eric as it was possible that twins could be fathered by two different men. This planted a seed of doubt."
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By the time the twins were eleven the doubt had festered in Eric’s mind and he demanded a DNA test on Natalie, which his wife agreed to. The result came back that she was his daughter but the woman said he still acted distant towards the little girl.
Things really came to a head when one day the wife was using her husband’s phone to look for a recipe for dinner because the battery on hers had died and she made an awful discovery. She came across a forum which he had posted in.: "Where Eric was convinced I slept with a black man, was making awful comments about black people,” she wrote, “and that I somehow altered the DNA test results. I was furious and confronted Eric. He said there was no way Natalie could be his and demanded another DNA test."
She agreed to prove him wrong and again it came back that he was the biological father. But the woman was still baffled as to why her daughter looked so different and asked her mum about it, who eventually owned up to a big secret: "After dancing around the topic, my mom confessed that my dad was not my real dad, and my real dad was bi-racial. After looking at an old picture, my dad looked white at first glance but the longer you looked at him, the more you could see his African-American side; I happened to not inherit those genes."
This explanation was enough for Eric to finally believe his wife hadn’t cheated on him but for her, the damage done was too great. She said: "He apologised and said he couldn’t understand at the time, but I told him it was disgusting that that was what he thought about that community and I refused to raise my children in an environment that fostered and normalised negative thoughts about any community. Eric and my parents tried to get me to rethink my decision and to go to counselling. I agreed to go to counselling, but I am not changing my mind about divorcing him."
Other readers fully backed her decision to divorce her husband and some wondered why she hadn’t done it sooner. "I would have divorced him after the first DNA test. If not before or during," said one. Another wrote: "I would have handed him the results and divorce papers in one envelope." A third posted: "What would have been funny is for her to say I'll let the DNA results come to you, not me, as I am 100% confident the results will show that you are the father and no one else. And when the results confirm this, I will be leaving you."
Another pointed out that mistakes can happen at birth: "Given that hospitals sometimes have oopsie switch-a-roo situations, when paternity is challenged and the mother knows she didn't cheat," they said, "then she should be tested against the kid too. Since if it is another couple's kid, the paternity test comes back "not the father" and s*** hits the fan."
Summing up the general view, one wrote: "It’s disgusting and incredibly sad that his own daughter brought out the racist in him. OP, please get both kids ~ especially your daughter in therapy asap."
Do you agree? Let us know in the comments below.