Fathering Children And Not Knowing
By: Average Don Juan
Tags: Children, Parenting, Family, Fatherhood, Sex

Fathering Children And Not Knowing

Photo by alekseykh from Depositphotos

This past week, a friend of mine, Pete, called me up to talk about old times and ask how I was doing.

Pete and I played college hockey together and while we were close for a few years after school, we’d kind of lost contact with each other as life drags you in different directions.

He’d heard through some mutual friends that I’d been unwell a few months back and wanted to make sure that I’d not succumbed to the dreaded virus, or as he put it, “I didn’t think that thing was strong enough to kill you.”

I explained that I didn’t have the Rona but had gotten a pretty nasty E.coli infection that spread to become sepsis and that it, “knocked me off my feet.”

Pete laughed briefly and uncomfortably, “Speaking of being knocked off your feet… Remember Winny?”

Winny was a young lady that Pete had fallen head over heels in love with during our senior year of college. She cast this spell over him and just about every aspect of his life suffered as she dominated his time and attention. He went from being a very solid student and dependable 2nd line winger, to an average student who struggled to complete assignments on time and a 4th line scrub who was barely able to hold his spot in the lineup.

“She reached out to me about two months ago on Facebook.”

I was quite surprised if we’re being truthful.

About three weeks after our final semester finished, Winny ghosted Pete.

And not in a “she didn’t return his calls” kind of way.

Winny vanished.

She told her parents that she was moving out west to start her career in Hollywood (she’d studied screenwriting) and that she’d be in touch when she got settled.

She didn’t even tell Pete or any of her friends she was going — she just packed up one night, hopped in her car, and was gone. Winny never called Pete ever again as far as I knew. From what Pete told us at the time, she didn’t even call her family. They raised the issue with the FBI who three months later called her folks back and simply said, “She’s alive, healthy, and settled. She doesn’t want to be contacted.”

That was that.

Pete became a fireman, got married a few years later, has three lovely daughters, and has invested his savings incredibly well. I worked with Pete on some investment advice just after the GFC and he went long on property when the market dipped, so Pete is probably the wealthiest firefighter in his entire brigade.

I was shocked to hear about Winny, “Wow, man. That’s a blast from the past. How is she? Better yet, where is she?”

He told me that she was living in Arizona and that she owns a small chain of truck stops. Pete said that she’d moved to Hollywood right after school and struggled before finally selling a few scripts. She took that money, moved to Arizona and bought a diner. A highway was literally built out front of her diner and she parlayed that into the business she has today.

The whole time Pete told me the story, there was an uncomfortable tone.

“Did she ever say why she left?”

“Yeah… she was pregnant and didn’t want to settle down.”

Silence.

I wasn’t expecting that. I figured she’d met someone else and ran off with them or perhaps there was some family trauma, but that was unexpected.

Pete told me that Winny moved to Los Angeles, found a job as a production assistant right away and had benefits, so she was able to keep the baby. She didn’t tell her family where she for nearly five years and she swore them to secrecy from Pete because he’d moved on and started his own life.

“DJ, I have a 23-year-old son that I’ve never met.”

Pete told me that he told his wife and that she was supportive. He and the young man, Jake, had spoken few times and that Jake had requested a DNA test to confirm everything. The test came back a match, so it was settled.

Winny had told him that his father had passed away in a car accident shortly after finishing college and that he had no family. She never married again or had any other children, Pete said in his conversation with her, she said that she’d simply devoted her life to raising their son.

I asked Pete how he was handling things and he was obviously of mixed emotions — on the one hand, he was angry that Winny had kept something like this from him and deprived him of the chance to know his child, but on the other hand, he said that Jake was friendly, smart, and clearly happy with life, so that was something he was grateful for.

“The best part, DJ, is that he wants to meet me and my family. The girls are shocked but excited to have a brother they didn’t know about. Evelyn (Pete’s wife) says that Jake is now an extended part of our family, so we’re looking forward to finally meeting him.”

Unfortunately, the dreaded virus is making it difficult for people to travel and one of Pete’s daughters is slightly immunocompromised so they have agreed to wait to bring Jake out to meet the family until vaccines are rolled out more broadly and things get back to normal.

Surprisingly, it’s not entirely uncommon for people to not know who their real fathers are and for men to not even know they have fathered children.

There’s not a great name for this — you have “paternal fraud” and “absentee fathers”, neither of which really fit the bill. Then there are children who are “illegitimate” in that they are born outside of wedlock or a committed relationship.

None of those things is a fair way of describing Pete’s situation.

From what you can research, the number of “paternal fraud” instances where the real biological father has no idea about his paternity, is pretty high. Overall, “paternal fraud” has been overestimated for decades, but the number is still likely to be between 1%-2% of babies born in relationships and the vast majority of those, the biological father never finds out about his role.

Similarly, with the children born outside of a relationship — a high proportion of those men are unaware that they’ve fathered a child.

It’s a really strange situation and one that doesn’t get talked about a lot.

I had a brush with this myself a few years back.

Before I started seeing my wife, Mel, I was playing the field a fair bit in college, as many young people are wont to do.

I was seeing this young lady, Cici, periodically for nothing more than just the odd booty call — it was entirely mutual, we would call each other and tee something up when the mood struck.

When I started seeing Mel, I simply broke off all of those other situations and focused on her and never gave Cici or any of the other women I was seeing a second thought.

Cici and I had mutual friends and when Facebook became a thing, she and I became friends. We would occasionally “like” something the other posted but we never really communicated beyond that. She was married, had kids, moved to Ottawa, Canada, and that was that.

One time, I was traveling to Ottawa for a conference and posted on Facebook that I was looking for dinner recommendations.

Cici hit me up on Messenger and said that she’d love to catch up for coffee if I had time to reminisce. I agreed and we set something up.

The whole meeting was kind of weird.

Cici was far more effusive and touchy than I remembered her. When we were seeing each other, she was kind of this Grunge style which was popular in the early-to-mid 90s, so she was a bit sullen all the time and quite hedonistic which is likely what attracted me to her. But when I turned up at the restaurant at the bottom of my hotel in Ottawa, she was wearing a bright sundress, was absurdly outgoing, and very much into hugs and kisses.

She had this perma-grin on her face the entire time and everything about her was perfect — her makeup, her hair, her white teeth, and even her dress was perfectly increased. This was the antithesis of the person I knew.

We chatted, she was super bubbly. She laughed and mockingly chided me for my sarcasm and little jibes.

Then her two teenage daughters turned up.

Yeah, they just rocked up at the restaurant and sat down with us.

The older girl was one year off the last time I’d seen her mother and if we’re being honest, when she walked over, I got this cold rush of blood because she looked uncannily like my sister.

The girls said that their mother spoke of me fairly regularly as her “college sweetheart” and that they were excited to finally meet me. That made me even more uncomfortable because Cici wasn’t my college sweetheart by any means, she was a girl who would call me for sex and ask me to grab some Chinese food on the way over.

I played along and both girls were friendly and smart, so it wasn’t entirely unpleasant, just a little uncomfortable.

After about 45 minutes, the girls said they were going to head out and do some shopping in downtown Ottawa while their mother and I reconnected.

As soon as the girls left, I raised the issue of her older daughter with Cici.

“Uhhh… Look… I have to ask… She looked an awful lot like my sister… And well, the dates line up pretty well. Is there something I need to know?”

She laughed and patted me on the thigh, “Don’t be silly, she’s my husband’s daughter. After you and I stopped seeing each other, I rebounded with him immediately. I’d had the flu at one point, couldn’t keep anything down including my birth control apparently, and here we are.”

I felt some relief, but still, something seemed suspect.

Cici smiled, “Trust me, I’d thought about it too. She has eyes very similar to yours… but so does her dad. We did one of those home DNA tests last year as a family to track our ancestry, I was a little relieved.”

I was relieved as well and decided that this strange reunion needed to end.

“Well, Cici, it’s been fun and a pleasure to meet your daughters, but I have a presentation to craft for the conference tomorrow, so I think I might have to duck out at this point.”

Cici nodded and matter of factly said, “Would you like to go back to your room? I’d enjoy that. One for old times sake.”

Very rarely in life am I lost for words. This was one of those times.

“Uh… I wasn’t really considering it. I think seeing as we’re both married, it’s probably best if we don’t.”

She smiled, “Well, I thought I’d offer. We always had great chemistry and it was worth asking.”

Truthfully, under different circumstances than what had happened over the previous hour, I probably would have accepted — Cici was still exceptionally attractive and her perfect appearance kind of triggered this animal instinct in me to mess her up slightly.

But the reality was, I was weirded out, so we took our leave.

I was luckier than Pete at the end of the day, although you know what, how things seem to be working out, he would probably say he got the better end of the deal than me.

Good for him.