95. DOUBLE LIFE
I found out over Christmas while doing a family history search online that my dad had fathered two children by a different woman about 20 years ago.
He and my mother have been married for over 35 years. His name brought up results for not only myself and my two brothers’ births, but two other births.
He has very unusual first and last names so curiosity got the better of me, and I started to find out more.
The births were registered in the north of England, in the Newcastle area. This rang alarm bells immediately because my dad had worked in this region for five years with the company he worked for in the early 90s.
I was only a little kid back then, and I missed him so much at the time. So did my brothers and mom; he worked on a two-week on, two-week off rotation, so he was always back and forth.
Then I dug a little deeper. Just to confirm. I found the children (now grown women) and their Facebook pages. They still used the last name given to them at birth—our father’s.
I didn’t contact them because I had a suspicion they’d have no idea they had siblings, and my suspicions were confirmed when I contacted their mother on there instead.
At first, I told her I was a “relative” of my dad’s and I wanted to know more about any children he potentially had because I was trying to track him down.
She confirmed that he was the father of her children after I sent her some details and a photo from that time. She proved it 100% by scanning and sending me copies of the birth certificates and some photos she had of him and their daughters when they were just babies.
Then she told me to call her.
I called her—I can’t say I was ever nervous or anxious about this call, but I remember feeling livid. Livid at him mostly, for what he’d done to my mother and us as a family while he had supposedly been working hard and “all alone” up north, and while his wife and children sat on their thumbs in Wales patiently waiting for his return every two weeks for five years.
I told her my name and that I was actually his daughter—his only daughter, I thought up until that moment, and that I had two other brothers who were older.
I added that my parents had, in fact, been married for over 35 years. This poor woman screeched down the phone crying. She never knew any of this.
When she met my father it was in a pub in Newcastle about three months after he had moved up there.
He said he was single and didn’t have any family. He told her he was from Wales, but he lied about the area he grew up in.
A couple of months later, they were expecting their firstborn, and about a year after that a second daughter. She said when he went back to Wales every two weeks she thought it was for work-related stuff and that he would call every other evening from a local phone box because he didn’t have a landline.
When the daughters were just little kids, he left one day to go to Wales and work and never came back. She tried to contact the company he worked for and they said he no longer worked for them.
This was around about the time, to my knowledge, his five years in Newcastle was up, and he had left the company and moved back to Wales.
And that’s not the worst part.
Because he had lied about where he lived in Wales, she was unable to track him down, and now being left with two girls and no job, she had to get on with it.
After about a month, she realized he wasn’t going to contact them ever again and he was gone—wherever. She didn’t have a clue he had a massive family with a wife and kids and a mortgage and a dog back home in Wales.
If she had, she definitely would not have gotten into a relationship with him, and least of all had kids. I haven’t brought it up with him obviously because of my mother, but Christmas was so difficult for me personally knowing this.
For two days leading up to Christmas, I drank so much that I slept for 18 hours straight on Christmas day and missed the whole thing.
My father was fuming that I’d “ruined Christmas” and I very nearly then exploded, but I kept my mouth shut. But it wasn’t over.
The day after Christmas, I got a call again from the mother in Newcastle, telling me she had told her daughters very delicately what had happened, and that she will leave it up to them to decide what to do.
So far, they have done nothing. I have not been in contact with them at all and vice versa since. However, the mother did call me around February to check in with me and see how I was—she’s a very nice woman.
At that point, she was curious if I was visiting the north in the future and if I would like to meet her family. I told her I would think about it.
I’m actually visiting Newcastle for a hen party in two months, so I’m thinking about it more. Part of me hopes one day they come knocking on our door because they know where to go now.
Part of me doesn’t because of my mother.
Over the past seven months, my relationship with my father has disintegrated and is the chief cause of his “stress.” It’s so bad he’s telling me it’s exacerbating his heart condition (which he is on pills for).
My parents are putting it down to some kind of “mid-20s rebellion” because I didn’t have a rebellion when I was a teenager. I just want to kick him in the face every time I see him.
The next step in this saga is to tell my eldest brother. He is serious and mature and will be able to deal with it a bit better, I think.
He’s never had a great relationship with my dad for some reason so I’d like him to know. His wife (my best friend) already knows there is something wrong with me because I think I’m pretty much having a breakdown over it.
The burden is too tough, I’m even struggling with my job. Part of the reason I want them to knock on our door looking for their dad is so that the weight is lifted, but how do you go back from that?
My mother is a proud but fragile woman, and it will destroy her.