When George figured out his dad had conceived this child before getting married — that the child was not the result of adultery — he was excited. "I thought it was the coolest genetics story, my own personal genetics story. I wasn't particularly upset about it initially, until the rest of the family found out, and their reaction was different."
His mother and sister could not handle the information, and his father went against their wishes, dedicating himself to reconnecting with his estranged son. "Years of repressed memories and emotions uncorked and resulted in tumultuous times that have torn my nuclear family apart. We're not anywhere close to being healed yet, and I don't know how long it will take to put the pieces back together."
"George" says: "I would want a warning saying, "Check this box and FYI: people discover their parents aren't their parents, they have siblings they didn't know about. If you check this box, these are the things you'll find."
Yeah, like that would have kept George or anyone else from opening this particularly fascinating Pandora's box.
I believe with 90% certainty that "George" is female.
I have a complicated family background myself (not willing to go into it in public under this handle), but in George's shoes, I would not have pushed this; in particular, I would not have told Thomas about his father nearly as easily.
It's not important, but it's interesting that people reacted quite strongly to it. It was an off-hand comment based on the writing style, tone and perspective, a dozen or more things in the article. I should have parenthesized it, and left it at the end of my comment.
I had the same intuition, actually, and I can't really articulate it either. Interesting that someone else had the same notion.
To the extent that I can back it up at all, it seems to be something to do with the concern George has with how his family feels about this - the interpersonal aspects. Which, when stated this clearly, seems ridiculous, since obviously men can have just as much concern about their families breaking up as women can.
It was just a feeling I had while reading the piece.
* George Doe, rather than John Doe; an alias possibly chosen for gender ambiguity, bringing to mind George Elliot
* Uninhibited display of emotion with emphasis: "fell in love with", "so exited about", "so confused", "freaked out", "immediately felt empathetic", "really devastated" - there's loads more. Men tend to take much less vulnerable verbal positions.
Interestingly, a coworker just brought up this article beside me a few minutes ago (not knowing I'd already read it), and he too thought it was a woman writing.
More than emotions, it was that their lives were being affected in some form: something else was being added to it that was not there when they decided to enter into a relationship. Particularly for the mother, she basically entered into a relationship without all the facts known. Maybe she would have decided differently at the beginning.
Personally, I am not sure why the sister is so upset. It's just another sibling, which should bring happiness. But in a world where lawsuits are common, maybe she also feels threatened (sharing of inheritance, for example?).
I think it is fair that the mother is upset. She has to deal with more "baggage." But I don't think this is worth divorcing over. Things must not have been that solid for this to end up in divorce. A strong marriage should have survived this.
It's probably not a good idea to speculate on the relative strength of other people's marriages, especially internet speculation. We still don't know everything that happened; nor should we. So, let's not pretend that we know what is going on here.
The basis of the story is that with genetic testing with a service like 23andMe you can find things that you may not have wanted to have known or expected. Let's just leave it at that.
> So, let's not pretend that we know what is going on here.
Absolutely. When we make bold assertions like "X would Y" we are bringing a huge amount of personal bias, baggage and most of all ignorance to the table. It blinkers us to the vast range of possible realities that our impoverished imaginations (and our imaginations are always impoverished) are incapable of conjuring.
As an exercise, before posting "X must be Y" it is very much worth-while thinking of half-a-dozen movie scripts that could tell a story that would fit the known facts. In the present case they might look like:
1) Basil Fawlty-like character goes off the deep end upon discovering child from before his marriage
2) Uptight wife divorces husband for youthful indiscretion
3) Husband's former double-life as a spy revealed by accident of genetic testing
4) Husband's former criminal life revealed by accident of genetic testing
5) Christian wife divorces when accident of genetic testing reveals husband was not a virgin at marriage as he had always claimed
6) Radical feminist wife leaves husband when she finds out he once patronized--and impregnated--a prostitute...
The only thing we can say with any degree of certainty is that the reality is far weirder than anything we can imagine. It almost always is.
In none of the above cases would the marriage necessarily be describe as "not strong" prior to being put to the test.
To claim that "a strong marriage should have survived this" is vacuous tautology: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1087. It is true that a marriage strong enough to survive whatever happened would have survived whatever happened. It is also true that a big enough blow will disrupt anything weak enough to be disrupted by that blow (http://www.cuug.ab.ca/~branderr/risk_essay/hymn_strain.html)
True, you can't be exactly sure based on a single case. This might or might not have been a strong marriage. Even very strong marriages sometimes but rarely break up out of nowhere.
But the initial statement is true in a probabilistic sense. A strong marriage most of the time will survive learning about this kind of event that happened well before the marriage started. That the marriage didn't survive is not conclusive, but does suggest that it was probably not a strong marriage.
I don't see any problem with that, as long as there is a clear distinction made between what is known and what is weak likely conjecture (and it's anonymous).
When George figured out his dad had conceived this child before getting married — that the child was not the result of adultery — he was excited. "I thought it was the coolest genetics story, my own personal genetics story. I wasn't particularly upset about it initially, until the rest of the family found out, and their reaction was different."
His mother and sister could not handle the information, and his father went against their wishes, dedicating himself to reconnecting with his estranged son. "Years of repressed memories and emotions uncorked and resulted in tumultuous times that have torn my nuclear family apart. We're not anywhere close to being healed yet, and I don't know how long it will take to put the pieces back together."