Advice No One Asked For - Number Eighteen/Transcript

Advice No One Asked For - Number Eighteen is the eighteenth episode of Buckley's "Advice No One Asked For" series. It is currently only available on YouTube.
Description (as seen on YouTube): Someone's been living a lie, and a person close to them isn't sure how to break the news. Of course, Buckley has the answers, whether they want to hear them or not (and they probably don't).
==Transcript==
(introduction music playing during the following paragraph)
Welcome to "Advice No One Asked For", the segment at A Dose of Buckley where I scour the Internet for letters written to people that aren't me, and then answer them anyway. Kind of like that nosy bitch you knew in high school, but funnier. Today's question comes from a woman who's been keeping a secret for nearly two decades.
Dear someone who won't judge me, 
After twenty years of marriage, my husband and I are getting a divorce. We have two kids: a twelve-year-old son, and an eighteen-year-old daughter. My husband adopted my daughter when she was three. She believes my husband is her birth father. How do I tell her that he's not her birth father? How do I help her if she wants to meet the birth father? How do I explain to my son that my daughter is his half sister? I want to handle this with compassion for both children.
Signed, Confused in Calgary
Well, I'm the confused one here. Let's do some math, shall we? You've been married for twenty years, which means you've likely been together for...let's say, at least, twenty years and a week - you know, you gave the relationship time to really flourish before getting married - and your daughter is eighteen. Your daughter is your son's half sister. In this case, they share the same mother, not the same father. This means that it's your daughter, which you had to have had two years into your marriage, conceived a little over one year in your marriage, but your husband wasn't the "seed man". It sounds to me like you have quite the fucking history of not being honest or faithful to people. How'd your marriage last twenty years? Barely out of the honeymoon, and you're getting knocked up by other dudes. Your question, How do I help her if she wants to meet the birth father? suggests that you know who it is and could/would make that happen. So that rules out a rape baby. The fact that your actual husband knocked you up six years later suggests that it wasn't a fertility problem solved with artificial insemination. The real question isn't, "How do I tell my daughter that daddy's not her daddy?"; it's "How do I tell my daughter that eighteen years ago, I was a big slut?" Are you trying to drive these children to suicide? "Well Billy, Suzie, I have something to tell you. Your father and I are going to get divorced. And if that's not enough for you to process right now, here's something else. Billy, Suzie's only your half sister. Your father isn't really your father, Suzie. I got knocked up by someone else when we were married, and your father adopted you, instead of sending my sorry ass back out to the streets where he clearly found me." For the grand finale, why don't you just tell them that there's no god, and by the time they're old enough to start their careers, there won't be any good jobs left because they'll have been shipped overseas? Just really crush those spirits for them. You want to handle this with compassion for both children? You can't!  That ship has fucking sailed. And you're about to get divorced at a very inconvenient time. Your daughter is eighteen, so she's got a say in where she goes, which will be far away from the both of you if you tell her she was fertilized with someone else's sperm and you neglected to tell her for...oh, I don't know, just her whole fucking life. And your son is twelve. Someone's gonna have to take custody of him, and he's at that age where he's gonna think it's his fault, and that he's being rejected by the parent who doesn't take him. Telling him he's also been lied to isn't going to help. My advice? Keep lying! I would never give this advice in any normal situation, but this is clearly not a normal situation. Plus you're pretty fucking good at it already. So go with your strengths on this one. Let her continue to think Daddy is daddy, and Mommy is not a massive whore.
(introductory music playing)
I'm Buckley, and you're welcome.