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."
Yeah, like that would have kept George or anyone else from opening this particularly fascinating Pandora's box.
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.
Could you clarify?
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.
This was the sentence that made "I think George is a girl" pop into my head. It just seems more like a relationship that two sisters would have.
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.
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)
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).
It's like soldiers, no one questions that they conspire to kill people, it's whether they are heros or murderers.
So maybe the mother had felt (probably for years) that the father wasn't appreciating her enough. And now he's making more effort to connect with this unknown child than he's spent on his wife and other children in years... suddenly the pent-up dissatisfaction comes out into the open, grievances are aired and people say hurtful things that make reconciliation impossible...
In this situation I can imagine talking to my father about it, but talking to everyone else in a family was a decision he made. I'm not passing judgment either way, but he wasn't like he was passive here.
Sounds like they just wanted an excuse for a divorce.
Or the story is bs.