Children coming out of the woodwork !

[ohh]

I met my husband of 20 years when he was 47 and he had only 1 child of 2 from a previous relationship which we gave unconditional love to and supported his mother. He is 70 now and just found out that he has 3 other children that he did not know about who were born in the 1970’s so adults now . 3 different mothers. Now all 3 trying to find out father - unknown why not told who their dad was . He is rather shocked and I’m a bit non plussed. My initial reaction was I hope our children (including the first he knew and grew up with us) are not affected as they are all under 23 as I am younger. Then I was like are you going to get to know them ? He doesn’t know what to do.

The mothers might not have known who the father actually was. If they slept with multiple bike gang members, how would they know which one was the father? DNA testing was not around in those days.

Maybe he did, condoms are between 85-98% successful, so assuming he slept around as a biker and was with 100 women once each, he could statistically have had up to 15 children.

He's been called a rapist on this thread. You think that's ok?

I assure you,he knows exactly what to do.!!!(Sorry,lol) .."live to ride" ha!
You can not change the past
Rather than focus on all at once,(am not involved,so that's easy) would DNA/ancestry type thing "match" .?maybe lead to contact siblings,then..'father'??
Isit verify (able)?
Regardless.
This is now.
Didn't know.... previously. 47 twenty yrs ago...is that even millennium?
So ..in 70's he be... Not 47 /free to roam?
For context(I bin dying say that,is very mumsnetish just now) he was (?) totally oblivious.
So tho "responsible" is with very relevant variation of didn't know?
So. You Already involved.
I think.he (alone)meets them..collectively, and individually. Acts,appropriately.three different mums ?= they (kids)fresh info too. He bes honest bout current life, minimum details tho..there fore your crew needs to know ..so this happened..
Then y'all take it slow. Gony be a"process" with no guarantee for anyone.
Pukey as it sounds...need a whole lotta love. . . Can still be ok tho

Soooo

He's a prolific impregnator (couldn't think of another word!). You can't say he isn't because he was a 50yr old (almost) man, shagging a 28yr old girl and getting her pregnant, too! He kept you around as arm candy? You're 51 now, I presume. The sad part, is he's 70 years old with teenagers. Those poor kids. All of them.

the only way you both will find out truth of what happened is to agree to contacted 3. If he truly didn’t know, there’s really nothing he could have done,

IMO he should get in touch, otherwise always be a question on his mind, and that of the 3.

if your children do any dna/geneology … those 3 will be revealed anyway.

it’s inevitable your kids find out.

He sounds grim the way he talks about the mothers of his kids. Women throwing themselves at some sweaty biker who's never used a condom in his life? Then being so ashamed they each chose to raise the kids alone without trying to contact him or make him pay CSA? I'm presuming he's given you HPV at the very least. What a fucking charmer.

That’s not how contraception statistics work. The 85-98% effectiveness rating for condoms means that on average, in couples using condoms as contraception over a period of a year (who on average will be having regular sex) 2% will become pregnant if they use condoms as directed and 15% will become pregnant with typical usage.

The whole situation would disgust me, honestly. I'd be shocked and look at him differently, if I learned the my husband or father had unknowingly fathered three children in his past, even if it had happened years before he was in a committed relationship. However, you already knew some things about him that would give many women pause (that he was a member of a biker gang), so maybe if his former promiscuity and poor judgement haven't come as a complete surprise, maybe it won't be quite so difficult to come to terms with the results of that behaviour.

There seems little chance of keeping this a secret from his younger children, so he'll just have to approach it with sensitivity and hope they are understanding and can learn from his mistakes.

Why?

He isnt on this thread. His wife is. His wife who married and had a child with him knowing nothing of this. How is you berating her husband in anyway helping the OP?

Yes there is an age gap but my godmothers daughter married a man 20 years older than her and is still very happy with him when she is in her 50's and him in his 70's. He was not a predator and she was not a victim of grooming. They fell in love, it happens

Slagging off this man for actions that happened 50 years ago in a totally different society and culture to the one that you live in now is in no way helping a woman who has been blindsided.

Thought it was terrible ?

Not that terrible

Slept with 3 different woman with no condom 😂

What a horrific man

To potentially have had 3 one night stands in a 25 year period between him being an adult and meeting the mother of the child your know about isn't exactly promiscuous. My confusion is 3 children coming out of the woodwork now - did they know each other? Why didn't the mothers tell him?

It does happen especially from the late 60's through to early 80's period as I've got friends irl that have got a sibling recently appeared because their dad had a relationship before their mother and the siblings mother didn't say, just disappeared.

@mitogoshigg it's highly unlikely that having sex 3 times will result in 3 pregnancies. Whilst men are 100% fertile, women are only fertile at certain times of the month, even young women. It's more likely that this man had unprotected sex dozens of times to result in 3 pregnancies (that went full term and are only now making themselves known - there could be many more currently alive or that miscarried or were aborted).

This.

Come on OP. There is not a cat in hells chance 3 random women all decided to hide their pregnancy from him, not ask for any child support and deprive their children of a father. You can't be that naive.

He's a liar.

They wouldn’t have any claim unless he includes them in his will - unlike with a wife and children under 18. Marriage nullifies any earlier will and results in everything being left to your spouse unless you write a new will. The only worry would be a poorly written will leaving everything to his children, rather than specifying the children from his current abd previous marriage.

But to do it 3 times ? No condoms ? Then shack up with a woman young enough to be your daughter. He sounds delightful.

There was a Dad at the DCs primary school with a similar history. Apparently unknown adult children from all over the world, much younger wife.He was also a deeply umpleasant person.

Either he abandoned 3 pregnant women knowing full well they were pregnant, OR THREE women decided to withold that information from him, which is highly suspect in terms of his character, I mean what reason would there be for three separate women to hide the fact that they were pregnant from him? It doesn’t make sense, and doesn’t look good

Well quite clearly many of us don't have living memory of the '60's and 70's.To have been an adult in 1960 you would need to have been born in the 1940s. It's like asking someone born in 1945 don't you remember the 1900's ? Of course they wouldn't.

I hope he does want to get to know them. Sure it will be a shock for your teens, but kids are very adaptable. The least he can do is to meet them if that’s what they want. I’d imagine it would be a hard blow to search for a parent, then say you don’t want contact. Perhaps they were all ONS and the mothers had no contact details for him. Good luck, what a mess, but could turn into something good.

The man you are married to has a very poor opinion of women. His comments about girls throwing themselves at him say a lot.

The fact that there isn't just one child here raises a lot of questions in terms of who he is and what he's like.

These were women who didn't feel they could approach him or were not able to approach him. Or they did approach him and he told them to piss off.

Now these children suddenly have been able to not only identify him but also get in touch with him. That suggests that someone has done a DNA test. It might not necessarily be him - it could be a close relation, which would lead to him suddenly being identifiable.

What I find interesting in the UK is there isn't much of a fashion for doing a DNA test. It's fashionable in the US and Canada to just do them for fun. In the UK the pattern is that people tend to do them either because they are really into genealogy and do it as a hobby and want to take it further OR they do it because they want to find out something very a very specific reason involving a family mystery.

My thoughts here are that if it's him who has done a test, I'd be raising an eyebrow about the why. Unless he has a keen interest in his family history, then I'd argue that there's something more here.

It could be innocent in terms of not knowing his own parentage and wanting to resolve that.

But the fact that there's three in the equation says to me he knew there was a strong chance he had another child or was fully aware there was a child or children out there. And he was the one who wanted to find out about them.

That would raise some pretty big questions about him potentially concealing this from me.

An age gap relationship on top of this also asked so worrying questions about his attitude to women and his maturity.

I would be very worried about multiple children turning up in this scenario. The children were possibly unable to get answers from their mothers and if their mothers are a similar age to the father it's highly possible they may have died without revealing the circumstances to their children.

It may well lead to finding out a darker side to the person you love which really is unattractive. There is potential for a lot of lies to suddenly unravel.

The warning here is that when you met him he had a two year old. He was 45 when he was still shagging around and had a baby from it. That was in the early 2000s. You dismissed this as being because he was 'in a big motorbike gang in the late 60’s early 70’s' and then said 'I’m 19 years younger from the age of safe sex'.

You are missing a massive point here. Why by 2000 - the age of safeguarding sex as you put it - was he still shagging about unprotected. His attitude didn't change with the knowledge of why you should have safe sex. He knew he had shagged about that much and knowingly was still doing it, potentially putting that woman at risk from his lifestyle. And potentially putting you at risk after that.

It strikes me that his attitude is still a problem.

Your defences of him are unsurprising. You want to deny who he is because you love him and admitting the truth about him isn't something you want to do.

But as you rightly point out, it's not just about you is it? It's about how your kids will react to this and process it.

You need to be asking some hard and difficult questions because that could well be what your kids do - not necessarily straight away either.

He has had a side of him revealed which really isn't nice and shouldn't be excused by the time - especially because he continued to behave in the same manner right up until he met you.

The age gap also means you are more likely to have had the wool pulled over your eyes for a long time because age gap relationships are usually unequal in power dynamics for various reasons with the younger partner typically much more vulnerable to manipulation by the older partner.

The reason you feel uneasy isn't because these children 'are coming out the woodwork'. I note your tone of distain. It's because you resent having to reassess your own relationship with him and it's easier to displace this and blame it on them.

Remember they are the innocent parties here who didn't have an active decision making role in their own creation. That's entirely on him. Not the women involved. He was perfectly capable of making different choices even in those days (those days include the early 2000s not just the 1960 and 70s remember). He didn't.

Wise up.

Read the OP carefully.

'he had only 1 child of 2 from a previous relationship which we gave unconditional love to and supported his mother'.

There were four women. He had a baby with a woman two years before meeting the OP. This child would have been born in the 2000s.

He is 70 now and just found out that he has 3 other children that he did not know about who were born in the 1970’s so adults now . 3 different mothers.

This is a man who has had children with at least five different women including the OP.

He also had a one night stand with the mother of the child that the OP helped raise OR either left her when she was pregnant or when that child was very young.

Was he still with this woman when he met the OP? A woman much younger than himself.

The OP needs to think very long and hard about the circumstances much closer to home than what happened in the 1960s and 1970s in terms of who her husband is.

Since I joined a DNA site this summer, I’ve been contacted by four half siblings, all with different mothers, all born between 1970 and 1975. They’d all already made contact but didn’t know each other until recently. We knew he was habitually unfaithful, but it’s been very upsetting. He’s no longer about to answer for himself.

Is there some sort of dna ancestory going on that's brought this all to light?

A few friends at university were sperm donors (mid 1980s) and it was quite well paid.

Back then I wouldn't have imagined you could be tracked down and traced.using DNA testing, if these men now know would they have still donated their sperm?