A long story about beng told I am a dad.

[Amiluckyjoe]

I'm really looking to see if I am being unreasonable about what is happening rather than what to do but happy to hear the opinions on that too.
So maybe this is in the wrong section. Who knows?
Its a long story but its best to start at the beginning.
13 years ago I had a long distance realtionship with a woman in Spain. It was always rocky and she acted oddly most of the relationship, cutting her hair off mid argument at one point and often saying it was over and then changing her mind 2 weeks later.
Oddly I loved her despite all this but by the end the arguments were just her and me shouting at each other and we broke it off, finally i thought.
The as usual she says she wants to give it one more try and moves in with me for a few weeks. On the last day she packs her bags, says it isn't working but also tells me she is pregnant, doesn'tr want me around but does want me to take responsibility. I do, and for 5 weeks we have odd conversations and she shows me pictures of the scans. The she stops calling
Then one night I get a bit drunk, so I call her, shes with someone else and takes the phone off the hook so that I can hear her and him at it. Lovely.
She then takes my rather angry call and tells me she has been seeing this guy behind my back and that in fact he is the father, or so she thinks.
I never speak to her again.

She then sends a friend into my workplace to tell me I've been harassing her two months later. I'm pretty convinced at this point the kid isn't mine, but still I wait for 3 years for an email to say yes or no. It never comes.

In the meantime I meet a lovely woman, we marry and we are very happy.
Then just over a year ago I get an email from the ex girlfriend. Friendly and casual at first she then starts dropping information about me and my family since we broke up, this spooks me and I wish her farewell. She then asks why I haven't asked about the question. I guess she is talking about the child and she says yes, you are a father and I want you to be part of his life.
I am as happy to do that then as I was 12 years before and so we make arrangements for me to meet him and so on. all the time I'm wondering and asking why she has got in touch now and not before. She says she was scared of me and didn't want to but now she has been advised by a psych to do it now for his sake. I don't really get that but accept it.
In the build up to the meeting she propositions me and there is a lot of strange stufff going on, but again I ignore it but make it clear I am not interested in her, just the boy and think it is unlikely that we can be friends or even like her very much. My wife is being an angel throughout this entire period.
So I meet the boy, he's great, his name's Diego and he looks a lot like me.
All goes well, I see him once a month for two visits to Madrid where they live until when I ask to arrange the next trip she says she is busy for the next three months so it will be really inconvenient for her. She will instead come in 3 months to London.
After a couple of weeks I persuade her to let me see him after just a month. It is not a pleasant conversation and her tone is beginning to move from friendly to constantly annoyed at me for asking to see my son.
Things thaw a bit at Christmas and then 5 days before the planned trip to London, she cancels. I am very annoyed and make it clear.
I then arrange to go back to Madrid, see her and talk about it and then finally arrange to see him regularly for 4 months. In the meantime it is his birthday and she doesn't tell me anything about it. When asked, she tells me to look at it on Facebook. I am again annoyed and tell her again that I don't like her and would welcome some help from her to have a a relationship with my son.
She insults me, I then insult her back and tell her exactly why. This was not a smart move.
Since then things have been difficult. The visits were always chaperoned by her, now they were chaperoned by her sister, the sisters boyfriend and sometimes I even had to entertain the ex's other son. All of these trips have been short, a matter of hours with him at most. I've seen him 8 times in 16 months for a total of 50 hours.
Then in June last year she tells my son and her sister that I am not there all weekend, this causes confusion and distress for my son and the sister argues with me that I had said that I wasn't. I show her the email and prove her wrong. An argument ensues and the ex threatens to stop me seeing him. She relents once, four months later and another argument happens with the sister when it becomes clear that they have no intention of my son ever meeting my wife or coming to London but they do expect my sister and her family of under tens to visit them.
I have now not seen him since October and he is losing interest in talking to me at all, I have though appointed a lawyer to get me some visitation rights. The case should eb settled at some point in the next few months but it may be too much for himand too late for us.

So I'm thinking, have I been unreasonable throughout this? I have after all accepted I have a son I was told wasn't mine. Have done what I can to see him and been threatened and rebuffed when I have asked to do any more than see him when it suits her.
Even after a year though I am wondering if I am wrong though, may be she should have hidden a son from me for 12 years and then made it difficult and uncomfortable when I do finally know about him. Maybe I do have to fit in with their life?
And then another part of me says that no mother should first hide a father from her son and then stop him seeing him after she has introduced them.
What do other people think?

Let me see if I've got this right:

13 years ago you had an on-off relationship, it was all a bit nutty, especially on her side.

She leaves saying she's pregnant, but there's a good chance it's someone else's child.

Eventually, 10+ years later, she's in touch, you meet the lad, he looks like you, the pair of you start to build a relationship.

At some point there's more arguments between you and your ex and contact becomes difficult.

You've got a solicitor on the case to get some sort of court ordered contact.

Is that about right?

The first question is (and maybe I've been watching too much Jeremy Kyle), but why haven't you done a DNA test to confirm that Diego is your son before starting to have a relationship with him? I'd say that's the place to start spending money.

You know I really don't know why I didn't do that at first either. He really does look a lot like me though which convinced me at first and still does.
As for the rest that's pretty much right. Her family seem to think I should like this woman for telling me and allowing me to see him.
I don't quite see it that way which has been the issue in the last two arguments just add where the arguments have actually been.
The ex has in fact not bothered to show up for over a year. She just sends snotty/ threatening emails.

Given that 12+ years ago the relationship between you and her was rocky at best, and given that it's taken her so long to decide to tell you that he's yours, I'd say DNA is a sensible thing to do to be sure - it also makes it clear for Diego.

If he is, then it would be right and proper that you do all you can to continue to have a relationship with him - send him emails, cards, etc; ask to Skype with him, ask to see him, and push for court ordered contact if necessary.

But it would be pretty awful, not to mention a waste of time, money and a lot of emotion and effort if it turns out in the future that Diego is not your son.

Mind, I can see the request for DNA testing being another thing for her to be upset about. Is there a common thread in her emails which shows what it is she wants from you in all of this?

Well... I guess there is the matter of if he's your son or not. A physical resemblance would be a good indicator for me too. But I think a DNA test is a sensible thing to do, if only to put a stop to your ex suddenly deciding he's not your child after all. Legally I'd imagine it's essential.

I would go the legal route. Get access sorted on a formal basis and build a decent relationship with your son with minimum interference for the mother if she's as dotty as you describe.

The legal route is being pursued as we write. The paternity case will be decided in the next 15 working days if she doesn't protest, which she had told me before in the past she would if I decided to take a legal route to gaining access. And this was when she was being nice!
As for emails. I send them fairly regularly, she reads them first and then if she likes the content she tells him he has an email. As a result he doesn't actually check for them on his own and rarely gets to read them.
Skype I have asked for many times. it has never happened. At one point when he and I were sending texts regularly and we all met up, she told me that she wished he wouldn't text me so much as it was costing her a fortune. She earns £150k a year, before bonus.
I send him presents for Xmas and his birthday and make sure that he knows I'm still here for him. He is though very much losing interest or has been told not to talk, I don't know which. Despite me asking every week he no longer wants to talk on the phone. He claims he is too busy with his homework.

As for a common thread for what she wants, or more imortantly wanted. At the beginning all she would say is that he had been asking for me so she had got in touch for him. Then after a week or two of talking about arrangements to see him she started to be as strange as ever, she sent me pictures of her in the bath, her tattoo on her lower torso and then started propositioning me for sex when I came over. She even said that when we broke up she lost something, my touch! I pointed out, as nicely as I could that I had no interest and that I was married. After I met them and pointed out that I really didn't want to have much to do with her due to another over familiar conversation she became the distant and disinterested correspondent in all this, which just got worse as my feelings became clearer and she saw no hope of me liking her.

So I think that she seemed to think there would be a renewal of the relationship and didn't really care about Diego in all this, that sounds arrogant but fits with her behaviour during the relationship. At best I think she didn't actually know what to expect from getting back in touch. She I think may have wanted to assuage her guilt, have her son meet his dad and then carry on life as normal without any interference.

The main reason I wrote this post though is to gauge whether people really see this all as normal or just acceptable behaviour. I am told by friends that it isn't but they would say what they think I want to hear.
I am just wondering if it is normal or just acceptable for someone to disappear for 12 years, come back into my life with a son and then tell me I can't see him anymore. Can she be justified in this and can anyone explain why the family have let her do this?
I am truly bewildered and with the case coming up the nagging thought of a year or more has come to the fore.

you need to stop trying to anaylyse why she does what - even wether is reasonable or not - you can never get into someone's minds when they are as dotty as they are...

just focus on getting DNa confirmaiton if he is or isnt your son.

if he isnt then sad as it is, leave well alone

if he is then pursue contact thru courts so he know that youa re there for him

Well of course it's not normal or acceptable behaviour !

From the way you describe her she's mad as a box of frogs.

It's not normal. It's Jeremy Kyle level not normal.

You don't wait more than a decade to introduce a child to their other parent when you all live in the same general area of the planet - in this case the EU - and you shouldn't do it wherever you are.

You definitely don't then whip that child away from the parent they're bonding with, unless it's clear that parent is a real danger to the child.

Your ex is a piece of work, but you knew this. I suspect, like you, that Diego really is your son (I really hope so, otherwise even Kyle would have problems getting his head round why a mother would do this to a child).

So long as you have records of your attempts to contact Diego, then there's not much else you can do that you aren't already doing

If my ex had residency of our DD, then I could well imagine her acting in a similar way, and telling DD whatever she thought was appropriate to get what she wanted.

Keep going. Diego will soon see her lies for what they are - at his age he must have doubts already. I hope it works out for you all, but it looks like you've got a serious mountain to climb. You need those DNA results though.

Mad, possibly, unpleasant yes, her second son is the same age as her boyfriend's child by his wife, well 3 months younger, so they both knew the wife was pregnant. She smoked all the way through that pregnancy and on one trip flipped my son the bird and told him rather graphically where he had come from. She even had him take pictures of her fondling the genitals of a footballer's statue in a footbal museum.
So why haven't her family done something to stop this sort of behaviour?
In fact they seem to be encouraging it, claiming that these are things they actually support her in.
her younger sister even described her as the nicest person she has ever met.
I know I shouldn't try and rationalise or work out why it happens but I just cannot believe that a person can behave like this and have the support of their friends and family and hold told a well paid job.

Anyway thanks for the support and reassuring words. I am hoping that it all works out between Diego and I but really see it as a struggle now.

You, as cestlavielife says, need to stop analysing why they behave this way and focus on the important matter. Your son.

Who knows what hides in their family closet. It's not your problem at this stage.

My XP is from main land Europe and I constantly have to remind myself that there are cultural differences that I need to be aware of and not mis-read according to my own perceptions.

But again. Even with that considered she sounds volatile, with some deep issues around sex and control.

sound like the whole family are mad, bad and dangerous to know....hope Diego (and his brother) has some good mates and other role models in his life.

At least if DNA shows he is yours he will know you are there...and i think you are great for putting up with so much already...
don't drive yourself mad trying to work out why they are like they are....you can't! save your energies for your son and doing what is right and building up the lovely family that you have here.
all the best Op..i hope you are "luckyJoe"!

The thoughts on here are reassuring above all.
time as you all say to think of him, do what I can for him and forget about his odd family.
I also hope his friends and their families will give him the guidance and support I think he will need. I will do what I can when I'm with him.