This has been reposted here to Lemmy as part of the “Curated Reddit Project.”

ORIGINAL by u/fullyfaithfulwife

I don’t know how it happened and I haven’t been able to stop crying all day. I never cheated. I love my husband, we’ve been together since college and he’s the love of my life, he’s handsome and kind and while I’ve slept with two other people, both were before we got together. There is no other potential father for our daughter. We were married already and actively trying for a baby. I never cheated, I never would cheat, and I don’t know why he took that stupid test because I would never, ever cheat, but it came back negative and now he thinks he’s not her dad. I don’t know how to convince him it was a faulty test and I’m so scared.

These past few months it’s like he’s become someone completely different from the man I married. He’s cold, and suspicious. He kept demanding to see my phone, and wouldn’t tell me why, and I showed him at first but eventually told him I wouldn’t anymore unless he explained why. He’s been distant with our daughter too. He stays in his office for hours on end, and I don’t know what he’s doing. I did not cheat. He accused me this morning, saying he’d done the test after realizing that our daughter’s eyes (brown) wouldn’t naturally come from ours (both blue) and that he wanted me to get out of the house. I didn’t leave and he locked me out of our bedroom and now I’m in my daughter’s room. This is terrifying.

What should I do?

Edit: The specific advice I want is how I can prove I’m innocent and how to make sure this relationship works. I want to keep my family together at all costs.

Also, I just had a conversation with my husband. He’s out of his room now, and we discussed some things. I told him again that I would never cheat and started talking about a list I made of tests I want done, but he told me that he didn’t want to hear it right now. We’re going to have a longer conversation tomorrow and he said that he still loves our daughter, and he won’t try to keep me out of the house or our room for now. I asked him to hug me and he did. I’m scared that I won’t be able to convince him. I just want our family to go back to normal. How can I be a good wife and support his needs while proving my innocence?

TL;DR: My husband confronted me this morning saying our daughter isn’t biologically his after a failed paternity test, but I never cheated.

UPDATE

Hi everyone. First off, I wanted to thank everyone who reached out, my original post got so much attention, it was hard to get to everything, but I ended up making a list of plans, and tests I wanted to get done. My husband was (understandably) distrustful of me for a while, but he apologized for the way he acted (which I didn’t need) and said that he wouldn’t try to kick me out of our home. He did say, though, that if every test came back and I’d cheated, then he was going to “go scorched earth.”

We did a few tests. Blood paternity tests for him and me, and our daughter, and we had an appointment with a chimerism specialist coming up, but that got canceled because, well, some of you guessed it, but my daughter is not biologically mine either. I don’t know how this happened, but a police officer came to our house and took our statements, and we’re suing the hospital where I gave birth. I don’t know what happened to my baby, and that is terrifying. I have my husband back, but my whole world was still upended, and I just wish he’d never taken that stupid test. I’ve been sleeping in my daughter’s room, and I’m so afraid that she’s going to be taken away from me, but at the same time I want to know where my biological daughter is, and if she’s okay. I pray to god she’s okay.

My daughter still doesn’t know the details, and we’ve been trying to keep this quiet. The last thing we need is a big scandal. I don’t want people who know us to look at her differently. She deserves better than that, she’s such a good kid, and she’s not some spectacle to be gawked at. If we can find her birth family, I have no idea what we’ll do. I guess the best case scenario would be to get a bigger house and all live together, but I don’t know if we can afford that, or if they’d go for that, or even if we’ll be able to locate them, or if I’m just crazy. This whole situation is crazy. I don’t know anyone else who’s been in a situation like this. I mean, are there support groups for parents of kids who got mixed up? I googled and nothing came up. Literally all I’m getting are tabloid articles from trashy magazines that slap the faces of innocent kids on the same pages as celebrity sex scandals, and fiction. How do we tell our daughter? I mean we can’t tell her now, she’ll tell the kids at school and then it’ll be everywhere, but we have to say something.

I don’t know what I ever did to deserve this.

TL;DR: My daughter is not biologically mine, or my husband’s.

OOP is also asking LegalAdvice for help.

OOP’s Husband’s Perspective on Everything:

Hello, everyone. So, apparently a youtuber my husband watches called Mark Narrations decided that it would be a fun idea to read my post on his channel. My husband recognized the story, because, well of course he recognized the story, how could he not? This doesn’t happen every day. Then he went on my account page. Then he found quite a few comments about him that were not exactly… nice. And now, he has asked me for a chance to post his side of the story on this account, so that people stop trashing him. Please be nice.

So, I don’t know how many of you have been down a self doubt rabbithole before, but it’s not the most logical place to be. It’s even less logical when you have the whole damn internet telling you that your wife is cheating, and that she’s planning to take the house, and take you for all you’re worth, and never really loved you, and you always sorta thought she was too good for you anyway, so you end up seeing everything as a sign of infidelity, and then you get not one, but two failed paternity tests on your daughter. When Covid happened, I got fat. I got depressed. I stopped feeling like a person. My wife stayed beautiful. She stayed herself. I was sure that she’d made a mistake. That she’d regret being with me. I started getting into some online groups, especially on reddit, that were full of guys who’d been cheated on, lost custody, lost everything, and when someone said that his tipoff was that he and his wife both had blue eyes and their son had brown, I felt fucking stupid. I did not want to jump to conclusions, but when I made a post about my fears, everyone said that she was cheating. People said not to say anything, because she’d use it to hide her cheating and get ahead of me on the divorce. I got the test and I didn’t really think it’d come back negative. Then it did. I didn’t want to believe it, but yeah, I pulled back. I felt betrayed. I wanted to be a good husband but I couldn’t shake this. I tried to find evidence of an affair, and failed. I got another test. When that one was also negative, I snapped. If you’ve ever been cheated on, you know what it feels like. When my wife denied it, I got angrier. I just wanted her to leave. I didn’t want to go through what everyone seemed to think was going to happen. I didn’t want to lose custody of my kid. I didn’t want to lose my house. I was scared, and angry, and I wanted the truth. I felt like if she couldn’t even be honest there was no getting past this. I took a few hours to calm down. When she came back with a list of tests to take, I tried to keep my cool. I tried to keep my cool for so long. I know I was wrong about the affair, but so was everyone else in my ear. My kid is genuinely not biologically mine. I didn’t immediately consider that switched at birth was an option. I’ve been through a messed up time, and I don’t think getting angry one time because I thought my wife cheated and was lying about it makes me a monster.

Hi, it’s Fullyfaithfulwife here again! I just want to say that 1. I agree that he’s not a monster, an abuser, or anything of the sort. 2. I do not agree that he’s fat. I love this man very much and have for ages, and we are not going to let this situation break our marriage. Thank you to everyone for all your help.