Am I wrong for trying to navigate incest ?
Part 1:
I honestly believe there could be a healthy destination, but I’m driving in the direction of disaster. In order to tell you where I’m at, I have to tell you where I came from.
When I was a child, my mother and the man believed to be my father got a divorce after a DNA test revealed I wasn’t his kid. When I became old enough to ask questions, my mom said they had made a mistake and that she would one day clear it up. I believed this until I became a teenager and started asking more questions. That’s when she told me that if it wasn’t the believed father, then she truly didn’t know who my real father was.
Questioning her and the life she lived hard enough for her to be so confused about the father of her child wasn’t easy, but I had to apply pressure. She eventually suggested an ancestry kit. I wasn’t really interested because, deep down, I wanted concrete answers. Who is my dad?
I reluctantly took the ancestry test and found distant family members. I wasn’t impressed, and honestly, I walked away from it. My mom, however, became invested. She asked for my account information and said she would take the puzzle pieces from there because she felt it was only right. It tainted our strong relationship because this information had the potential to change everything for both of us.
Eventually, she came back with information, but it was still blurry. She found relatives who believed they knew family in our state with the last name “Johnson.” We had never heard that last name before, and that was it — back at square one, back to confusion and unanswered questions. At that point, I felt like I was just picking at a wound.
About two years later, one random night, I got the urge to find my dad myself. I eventually came across a group similar to Reddit where people were trying to find lost family members. I posted my story, and a buddy of mine — who I didn’t even know was in the group — picked up on the age and city references I had made. Before that, I had only told him vague “I got dad issues” type of details.
After messaging me privately and realizing it was actually me, he told me about how he had been adopted and found his biological family through that same group. Then he said, “Hold on one second, I’ll put you in a group chat with the couple who helped me.”
This couple had admin privileges through Ancestry and allowed me to share my profile with them. They immediately got to work. By the next morning, they had answers.
They told me they had found my biological grandfather and grandmother on my paternal side. One of their children was my father, but they needed my mom to identify which one. Ugh… here we go again.
On top of that, my biological grandfather’s last name was “Johnson” — the same last name my mom had mentioned years earlier. So now, I was finally getting somewhere.
I immediately called my mom and asked, “Do you know anyone with this last name?” Since all the children they found shared the same mother, I used my potential grandmother’s last name.
My mom responded, “Yes… yes, I actually do.”
I asked her, “What’s going on? Could this person actually be my dad?”
She answered confidently: “Yes.”
I was shocked. That confident “yes” was insane considering she had spent years telling me she didn’t know — no clues, no leads, nothing.
She explained that, years ago, when she tried to get a DNA test from him, he told her there was “zero chance” because he had worn protection and was certain the child wasn’t his. She believed him and let it go.
So, she contacted a family friend of my now-believed father. Through them, she found out where he was and learned that he was alive and doing well. But while asking questions, the family friend revealed something unexpected:
“My dad’s mom’s name is Jamie Lee, and his father’s name is Curtis Simpson.”
None of that matched the “Johnson” last name connected to my grandfather and the distant cousins we had found, so once again, we were confused.
Then the family friend continued:
“But there’s something nobody knows, and I’m only telling you this for the sake of your son… Curtis Simpson is not his real father. When Jamie Lee was a teenager, she got pregnant by a man named Tony Johnson. She buried the truth and never told her son.”
That was the link.
That was the moment the butterflies started twerking in my stomach.
Now, I not only had to tell this man that I was his long-lost son after more than 20 years… I also had to tell him that the man he believed to be his father wasn’t actually his father at all.
My truth revealed his truth.