I never imagined that one casual conversation would completely change the way I saw my family.<\/p>\n
A friend of my mother\u2019s mentioned something that left me completely stunned: apparently, my father had been unfaithful to my mother repeatedly years ago\u2014and he may have fathered children with several different women.<\/p>\n
The worst part?<\/p>\n
He had apparently started an entirely separate family that none of us were supposed to know about.<\/p>\n
I have six siblings, making seven of us in total. But suddenly, I was wondering if there were even more of us scattered around the country.<\/p>\n
How many brothers and sisters could there actually be?<\/p>\n
I started thinking about all the strangers I had passed over the years. People I had stood beside at work, strangers I had talked to, people I had met without ever realizing they might share my father\u2019s DNA.<\/p>\n
Then an even stranger thought crossed my mind.<\/p>\n
What if I had unknowingly dated someone who was related to me?<\/p>\n
My parents had divorced 35 years ago after being together for only three years. Growing up, I was constantly caught between their arguments and unresolved problems.<\/p>\n
I thought I already knew the complicated history of my family.<\/p>\n
Apparently, I knew almost nothing.<\/p>\n
Now, at 36, I was faced with a question I never expected to ask:<\/p>\n
How many people out there could be my siblings\u2014and why did my father keep them all a secret?<\/strong><\/p>\n Suddenly, my family tree didn’t feel like a family tree anymore.<\/p>\n It felt like a mystery waiting to be uncovered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I never imagined that one casual conversation would completely change the way I saw my family. A friend of my mother\u2019s mentioned something that left me completely stunned: apparently, my father had been unfaithful to my mother repeatedly years ago\u2014and he may have fathered children with several different women. The worst part? He had apparently …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10760,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10759"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10761,"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10759\/revisions\/10761"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildwondertube.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}